Introduction

Astroport is the much-anticipated decentralised exchange (DEX) on Terra. ASTRO is Astroport's governance token.

A high demand for ASTRO tokens was evident in Phase 2 of Astroport's "lockdrop" event i.e. the ASTRO token price discovery phase. In this phase, the ASTRO token price was determined by the amount of UST users provided to the ASTRO-UST liquidity pool. At one point, ASTRO tokens were valued at more than 3 UST each.

The shine has since worn off partly due to the general crypto bear market and in part due to the poor communication and execution by the team.

Performance metrics

A number of observations can be made from the charts below:

1. ASTRO token's price has been on a downward trend (see line chart) with no respite.
2. There is significant selling pressure; c. 75% of ASTRO swaps in the last 90 days sold ASTRO vs. c. 25% bought ASTRO (see pie chart).
3. Price volatility (as measured by standard deviation - a measure of how widely dispersed prices are from the average) is low relative to LUNA's price volatility (see bar chart).

Conclusion and prospect

A downward price trend and high selling pressure, accompanied by low volatility indicates a lack of interest in the ASTRO token. This is not unique to ASTRO as most governance tokens of DeFi protocols on Terra have suffered from the same lackadaisical performance.

There could be renewed interest in the ASTRO token once the Curve Finance-inspired staking and locking mechanism is enabled in the near future.