South Korean authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Terra founder Do Kwon, four months since the spectacular collapse of his $40 billion digital asset project.
According to a local media report, the warrant was issued by the Seoul Southern District Prosecutors’ Office. Bloomberg further reports that the warrant is for Kwon and five others he worked with at Terraform Labs, the company behind the ill-fated LUNA digital asset and UST (un)stablecoin. They include fellow Terraform founder Nicholas Platias and Han Mo, an employee at the firm.
The trash-talking Kwon is currently residing in Singapore. In an August interview, he claims to have moved from (read: fled) South Korea before the collapse of his project in May, taking his family with him. However, about a week after Terra’s crash, his wife and daughter were still in South Korea and called the police about an intruder who had broken into their Seoul home.
With Kwon being in another country, South Korean authorities know that it will be much harder to arrest him and have made the arrest warrant valid for one year. The local paper which broke the news says that the authorities intend to work with Interpol to arrest Kwon.
In an August interview, which was his first since the May collapse, Kwon claimed that South Korean authorities hadn’t reached out about the Terra crash. This is debatable, as with most of the things he said in that interview. South Korean police had been openly investigating Terra for months, to the extent of raiding the home of Daniel Shin, one of the Terra cofounders. They had also barred Terra developers from leaving the country, making it implausible that they didn’t reach out to Kwon, or at least attempt to.
While denying any contact by authorities, Kwon claimed he was ready to face them, stating:
“What we’re going to do is we’re just going to put out the facts as we know them. We’re going to be totally honest and deal with whatever consequences as they may be.”
Before its crash, LUNA was in the top ten digital assets, while UST, its algorithmic stablecoin sister project, was the third-largest stablecoin after Tether and USDC. Their crash directly wiped out about $60 billion and hundreds of billions of dollars more indirectly, eventually sparking the collapse of Voyager Digital, Celsius Network, Three Arrows Capital (3AC), and several other intertwined entities.
However, this has done little to slow Kwon down. He has gone on to attempt revamps of the failed project, airdropping LUNA2 to former Luna holders. With the support of exchange heads like Kraken’s Jesse Powell, he has found a new lease on life, but with authorities closing in, it might not be for long.
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