Kujira was co-founded by the pseudonymous Brett, Hans, and Dove to “provide fair and equal opportunities for all investors in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space.” The network was founded in May 2021 following a liquidation cascade on Terra Classic’s Anchor Protocol that saw the price of LUNA drop approximately 75% (from $16 to $4) in one week. This resulted in many retail investors being liquidated by liquidation bots. In response, Kujira’s project team deployed ORCA (previously Harpoon Protocol) on Terra Classic, an application for anyone to bid on undercollateralized loans from Anchor Protocol without writing code.

Terra Classic was halted on May 12, 2022. The next day (May 13, 2022), the Kujira project team announced that it would develop its own Layer-1 network using the Cosmos SDK to replace its application on Terra Classic. On July 1, 2022, Kujira’s mainnet was launched, allowing CW-20 KUJI and CW-20 sKUJI tokenholders on Terra Classic at the time of the snapshot to migrate to native KUJI at a 1:1 ratio. The mainnet launch also saw the release of (i) BLUE, Kujira’s interface for KUJI staking and onchain governance and (ii) FIN, Kujira’s order book-based decentralized exchange (DEX).

Following the mainnet launch, the project team deployed several applications and features:

• The USK stablecoin was launched on Kujira on Sept. 12, 2022, alongside ORCA, the project’s liquidated collateral marketplace, redeployed from Terra Classic.
• BOW, a liquidity engine within Kujira that increases the liquidity depth of the FIN application, was released on Dec. 2, 2022.
• The first token presale went live on PILOT, a launchpad deployed by the project team, on March 23, 2023.
• GHOST, an onchain money market protocol that allows users to borrow/lend supported assets, was released on April 24, 2023.