Arrest warrant issued for 'Lunatic' crypto baron behind this year's $40 billion crash

pcgamer.com:

Do Kwon is one of the most bullish and energetic crypto advocates out there. As the co-founder and CEO of Terraform Labs, he would in better times take on critics and puff the crypto future to the high heavens: and he was a convincing guy, too, persuading many that the Terra ecosystem was where it's at.

That past may be about to catch up with him. An arrest warrant has been issued in South Korea for Do Kwon and five other individuals associated with Terraform Labs, as reported by Bloomberg(opens in new tab), on allegations that they broke capital markets law. The South Korean prosecutor's office said that all six individuals are located in Singapore. Why Singapore? One reason may be that it has no extradition treaty with South Korea, meaning a long and potentially tricky legal process lies ahead if the South Korean authorities push for his extradition.

This year's crypto crash has many elements to it, but TerraUSD is arguably the single most important. TerraUSD (also called UST) was a so-called stablecoin, meaning it had one purpose in the world: each TerraUSD coin had to stay at exactly the value of one US dollar. Which it previously had done before falling in value this May: first by slight amounts, then going into freefall. Let me give you an idea of how much value that's been lost: TerraUSD, now renamed Terra Classic, was supposed to be worth one dollar per one token; it is currently worth $0.000279 a token.

Crypto ecosystems are intertwined, with many new coins pegging themselves to stablecoins like TerraUSD, so this was the domino that made everything else fall. Do Kwon was also behind the Luna token, which collapsed in value alongside TerraUSD. Investors in the former were fond of describing themselves as