Do Kwon, international man of little mystery finally arrested? [84]

After helping drive the “crypto crash” Kwon went on the run... he ran so far away.

Good afternoon, friends!

Well, not so much for Do Kwon, founder of Terraform Labs and the collapsed TerraUSD stablecoin, a meltdown so catastrophic that it’s mentioned with shaken fists second only to FTX.

It didn’t take long after the crash of TerraUSD to ripple through the crypto markets, which was estimated to be a $40 billion loss in total when its ecosystem’s bottom fell out. The follow-on collapse certainly caught the markets flat and it went on to wipe out the fortunes of numerous individuals. 

Needless to say, Kwon did not make himself the most popular person with that one neat trick that everyone hated.

To make things worse for himself. He immediately sought to dig himself a deeper hole and tried to revitalize his company by attempting to launch a brand new cryptocurrency right after the first one failed.

I’m not even getting to today’s news, which involves the part where Korea put out a warrant for his arrest in September and he immediately became an international fugitive. He went on the run, all the while saying that he wasn’t on the run.

Although he wasn’t on the run, he stayed away from Korea and moved around a lot. All the while giving interviews and appearing on podcasts. He was so effective at hiding from authorities – not being on the run – that Interpol issued a “red notice” for him – otherwise known as a search and apprehend order. All the while he claimed that international authorities “obviously knew” where he was.

This came to a head recently when Kwon was finally apprehended at an airport in Montenegro after attempting to use falsified travel documents in an attempt to fly to Dubai. According to the country’s minister of the interior, Filip Azdic, Kwon and a colleague had forged Costa Rican passports. Authorities said that they were also carrying passports from Belgium, which also appeared to be faked.

Needless to say, after the disintegration of TerraUSD, Kwon has not been the most popular figure, but he has managed to keep up appearances – even if he has been in hiding and on the run. He was investigated for fraud and faces charges, in multiple countries including Korea and the United States.

The only other news that has drawn attention away from him is the fact that the collapse of TerraUSD led to a domino effect across the crypto industry that was capped off with the toppling of Sam Bankman-Fried’s now-defunct FTX.

Although I do not wish the prison industrial complex on anyone, both Kwon and Bankman-Fried may just find themselves sharing a jail cell.

I say this because Bankman-Fried is currently on trial in the US for his part in the FTX collapse and US attorneys have said that they will be seeking the extradition of Kwon for fraud charges. But they’ll have to play tug-of-war with South Korea apparently because they want him too.

Perhaps I was wrong, Kwon isn’t such an unpopular guy after all.

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Appearances

Just a new section of the newsletter where I talk about where I’ve been this week. This week I joined Harper Belmont as a showrunner/producer, and as such, I made an appearance a couple of times on the daily vlog they put out over the last couple weeks. As I’m getting my feet underneath me following my transfer from the prison camp in Beaumont to the BOP RRC here in Dallas, I anticipate ramping up my media and podcast appearances. More to come.

You'll briefly hear me talking around the minute timestamp about a friend who was “very nearly arrested for domestic terrorism.” This was a reference a friend who very nearly was an attendee of a benefit concert protesting so-called Cop City, and thus risked a domestic terrorism charge like other attendees, one of the very many

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Blockchain Bulletin

• eToro raises $250 after ending SPAC deal last year. EToro, a crypto trading platform, is raising $250 million after it abandoned a SPAC merger deal last year and the new funding puts it at $3.5 billion in valuation – a markdown from the $10 billion it could have been, reported CoinTelegraph.

• CCP Games raises $40M to build Web3 game based on Eve Online. Another games developer looks into blockchain as CCP Games raises $40M to build a Web3 game based on its EVE Online space MMO, reported VentureBeat.

Blockchain Behind the Scenes

• Magic Eden launches Bitcoin Ordinals NFT marketplace. Traders on Magic Eden will now be able to buy, sell and trade the new Bitcoin Ordinal NFT inscriptions on a new marketplace with newly audited minted collections added to the market.