Do Kwon’s whereabouts are unknown at the moment and he was last spotted in Singapore last month.
Founder of Terra, a blockchain protocol and payment platform, Do Kwon has been ordered by South Korea’s Foreign Affairs Ministry to return his local passport amid an ongoing investigation following a blockchain collapse that wiped out investors’ around $60 billion worth of cryptocurrencies.
According to the order issued on Wednesday, Kwon is required to submit his passport within 14 days, or else it will be revoked. Further, the crypto entrepreneur’s passport re-issuance application may be rejected if he applies before September 13, 2023.
The order comes after Interpol issued a red notice against Kwon late last month requesting law enforcement agencies worldwide to locate and arrest the East Asian crypto entrepreneur. Do Kwon’s whereabouts are unknown at the moment and he was last spotted in Singapore last month. Kwon, on the other hand, has repeatedly denied that he is on the run and is keeping in touch with his followers on Twitter.
Earlier this week, he denied claims that the South Korean prosecutors have frozen around $40 million worth of crypto owned by him. To this, he tweeted:
“I don’t get the motivation behind spreading this falsehood – muscle flexing? But to what end? Once again, I don’t even use Kucoin and OkEx, have no time to trade, no funds have been frozen. I don’t know whose funds they’ve frozen, but good for them, hope they use it for good.”
In May this year, the collapse of Terra’s cryptocurrency – Luna, and stablecoin – TerraUSD or UST wiped out investors billions of dollars, prompting investigations into Kwon and his colleagues. This came at a time when the crypto market is already reeling under a hard time amid weak global cues and tightening of monetary policies across most economies in the world.
According to Bloomberg, “TerraUSD, also known as UST, was meant to keep a constant value of $1 in a complex arrangement involving Luna. But the system depended on confidence in the ecosystem created by Kwon, a 31-year-old who studied computer science at Stanford. Once the trust disappeared, the arrangement collapsed.”
According to reports, the Terra coin has plummeted from a $116 high in April to less than $0.0002 now. In an instance around mid-May, an individual investor, who lost around $2 million, trespassed Do Kwon’s condominium asking for an apology; portraying that not just one but several investors might have lost their life savings in the crash.
At last, from investors to journalists to lawmakers across the world, the 31-year-old failed crypto-firm boss Do Kwon is expected to remain a hot topic for at least some time to come.
