Do Kwon, Crypto Fugitive, Led a Very Public Life While on the Run

According to the Interpol office in Seoul, Mr. Kwon arrived in Singapore last April, before leaving for the United Arab Emirates in September, the month that South Korea issued the arrest warrant for him. Investigators believed the trip to the Emirates was a stop on the way to Serbia, where Mr. Kwon had been in hiding with Han Chang-joon, Terraform’s former chief financial officer.

Even after Luna’s epic collapse, Mr. Kwon believed he could make a comeback in the crypto industry and unveiled a new digital coin. He told an acquaintance that he aimed to make his coin one of the 10 most valuable cryptocurrencies, without linking it to a stablecoin, according to a person familiar with his thinking.

After Mr. Bankman-Fried’s company collapsed, Mr. Kwon started posting frequently on Twitter. On Dec. 7, he linked to a Times article that reported the Justice Department was investigating whether Mr. Bankman-Fried had engaged in market manipulation that caused the collapse of Luna.

“What’s done in darkness will come to light,” he wrote.

In the recent call with The Times, Mr. Kwon said he had launched some open-source projects, using a term that typically refers to software built on code that is made publicly available. “I call it, like, technology philanthropy,” he said. “It doesn’t really have business models or tokens or anything of that sort.”

But the pressure on him was growing. In February, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged him with orchestrating a multibillion-dollar securities fraud. Privately, he confided that he was having a midlife crisis, and that he was spending too much time thinking and not enough coding, according to the person familiar with his thinking.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/business/crypto-do-kwon-terraform-labs.html