Former South Korean magnate of Cryptomonnaies Do Kwon, accused of being the source of a fraudulent bankruptcy of several tens of billions of dollars in 2022, pleaded guilty before a New York judge, according to court documents made public on Tuesday, August 12.
The co -founder and former CEO of Terraform Labs, 33, will experience his sentence on December 11. At the end of a plead-guilty agreement, prosecutors undertook not to ask for a prison sentence of more than twelve years-a rather mild agreement for the office of the New York prosecutor qualified, in a press release, as “One of the greatest frauds in history”.
Cryptoactive leaning against another cryptoactive
A graduate of Stanford, who passed by Apple and Microsoft, Mr. Kwon had had rapid success, attracting billions of investments in his company Terraform Labs. In 2020, he launched the terra, presented as a “stablecoin”, that is to say a digital currency whose value is guaranteed by reserves of other currencies or values. But unlike other stablecoins such as the Tether or the USDC, the value of the terra was not guaranteed by dollar reserves: it was linked to that of another cryptoactive created by the company of Mr. Kwon, the Luna.
In May 2022, when legal proceedings and suspicion multiplied on the real value of the terra, the two cryptoactives had entered a very rapid spiral of collapse of the courses; In one week, more than 40 billion euros in capitalization had disappeared. Do Kwon then fled South Korea and Singapore, where his company was located, and had joined Europe thanks to a false passport. He was arrested in Montenegro in March 2024 and extradited to the United States.
