Do Kwon Breaks Silence on Terra’s $45 Billion Crash, Says It Was “Essentially” His Life
Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon has finally broken silence in an interview with Coinage Media after the implosion of his flagship project, which wiped billions of dollars from the crypto market. According to him, Terra Luna was essentially his life, and he never thought of what would happen if it failed.
Do Kwon was known for his confidence in Terra and wasted no time bashing anyone who spoke badly about the project. In fact, a few months before the infamous crash, Kwon made a million-dollar bet that the price of LUNA would not trade below $95 in March 2023. Today, the price of the token is zero.
For the first time since Terra’s collapse, Kwon appeared in an interview, reflecting on the six darkest days of May while also defending himself against fraud accusations.
Kwon: Terra Was Essentially My Life
Kwon admitted that Terra’s collapse caused significant damage to investors and the crypto industry. He described it as “brutal,” noting that he also lost all his net worth in the crash.
“I don’t want to seem like my losses are larger in terms of emotional impact compared to people that had less to go on and then put [in] their entire life savings and then the Terra system went down,” he said.
He further noted that Terra was essentially his life, and he never thought of what could happen to him if the project failed.
“I just want to make it perfectly clear that the way that I thought about Terra and Luna was — I mean, this was essentially my life. And I put my actions where my beliefs are. I bet big, and I think I lost,” he added.
An Insider?
Terra’s woes started when the project suffered a liquidity imbalance on May 7 due to an unannounced transfer between trading pools. The anomaly wasn’t strange, and protocols usually recover from such events.
However, Terra’s case worsened when some unknown investors took advantage of the liquidity imbalance and sold $200 million UST stablecoins within minutes. The anonymous traders continued to sell their tokens until the next day, causing the stablecoin to lose its parity to the U.S. dollar.
Within a couple of days, investors were left scratching their heads as they watched the value of their assets turn to zero.
Kwon and his team started receiving multiple threats, fraud accusations, and lawsuits from investors. But while the Terra founder was trying to contain the attack, his executive team was en route to Singapore, leaving Kwon to fight the battle alone.
Kwon believes there was a mole in the Terra team who used private information to profit from the protocol’s vulnerabilities. According to him, the time of the fund transfer and his executives’ sudden disappearance was inside information.
“The only people that knew that were TFL employees. So if you’re asking me whether there was a mole at Terraform Labs, that’s probably ‘yes.’”
~ By William A. Frederick ~
