LUNA

Terra co-founder Daniel Shin’s arrest denied by court, citing low flight risk

Shin currently faces multiple fraud charges, specifically concerning allegedly hiding risks associated with investing in the in-house tokens by Terraform Labs.

A local court in South Korea denied the prosecutor’s request to issue an arrest warrant for Terraform Labs co-founder Shin Hyun-Seong, also known as Daniel Shin. This was the second attempt made by South Korean authorities to reign in Shin following the recent arrest of Do Kwon — Terra’s other co-founder.

On March 23, Kwon was arrested at Podgorica airport in Montenegro while attempting to use fake documents to fly abroad. The Seoul Southern District Prosecutors Office took advantage of this situation and, on March 27, requested an arrest warrant for Shin, citing his involvement in cashing in illicit profits from Terra (LUNA) and TerraUSD (UST) sales.

However, the Seoul Southern District Court denied the request while citing unconfirmed allegations and the unlikeliness of Shin being a flight risk or destroying evidence, according to local media Yonhap.

Shin currently faces multiple fraud charges, specifically in relation to allegedly hiding risks associated with investing in the in-house tokens by Terraform Labs.

Following Kwon’s arrest in Montenegro, authorities from both the United States and South Korea have tried to extradite the entrepreneur.

As Cointelegraph reported, Montenegrin Justice Minister Marko Kovač said the U.S. made diplomatic efforts to ask for Kwon to be handed over, while South Korean officials have requested extradition.

Magazine: US enforcement agencies are turning up the heat on crypto-related crime

“In the case when we receive several extradition requests, I would like to say that determining to which state they will be extradited is based on several factors like the severity of the committed criminal offense, the location and time when the criminal offense has been committed, the order in which we have received the request for extradition and several other factors,” said Kovač through an interpreter.

Terra’s branding at MLB opener draws attention from spectators

An attendee shared an image of a Terra banner with the slogan “a decentralized economy needs decentralized money,” prominently displayed during Major League Baseball’s opening day.

As baseball enthusiasts flocked to Nationals Park in Washington D.C for the opening day of the Major League Baseball (MLB) season, the appearance of Terra — the crypto ecosystem that collapsed in May 2022 — didn’t go unnoticed by attendees.

A Twitter user who attended The Washington Nationals’ home opener against the Atlanta Braves on March 30 shared an image of Terra prominently displayed on a banner with the slogan, “a decentralized economy needs decentralized money.”

“Sounds like a solid company. Will check out,” the user commented on the prominent placement of Terra at the stadium.

Sounds like a solid company. Will check out. pic.twitter.com/o3i9q2SnGA

— The D.C. Universe (@dcuniverse) March 30, 2023

Another Twitter user said the Terra Club — a VIP pre-game venue experience — is behind the home plate at Nationals Park, and “a big sign in left center” promoting Terra.

The partnership between Terra and The Washington Nationals’ came into effect in February 2022, just months before Terra’s collapse.

The Terra community committed $38.2 million in TerraUSD (UST) over five years to secure the deal.

Terra’s founder, Do Kwon, proposed the partnership through the community’s governance platform. Kwon is currently in police custody in Montenegro, and will reportedly face harsh conditions in the penal system, according to an unnamed criminal defense lawyer, in a March 29 Protos report.

It was reported that the conditions at Montenegro’s jails and prisons “haven’t changed” from those described in a 2020 human rights report by the United States State Department.

The report cited a 2015 case in which prison officers were convicted of torturing and “inflicting grievous bodily harm” on 11 inmates.

Cointelegraph reached out to the Washington Nationals for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

Magazine: Unstablecoins: Depegging, bank runs and other risks loom

Do Kwon registered a company in Serbia for $1 amid Interpol red notice: Report

The Terraform Labs co-founder reportedly established “Codokoj22 d.o.o. Beograd” in Serbia, with its main business activity listed as consultancy services.

Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon established a company in Serbia for less than $1 just weeks after being flagged with an Interpol “red notice,” according to documents from the Serbian Business Registry.

As per a DLNews report on March 27, citing the official records, Kwon opened a company called “Codokoj22 d.o.o. Beograd” in October 2022 for 100 Serbian dinars ($0.92).

It registered its main business activity as consultancy services.

Although Kwon is the company’s sole owner, Han Chang-Joon, the former CEO of Chai Corporation, was reportedly listed as a co-director.

It has also been alleged that Kwon and Han used their Korean passports to register the company — which is still reportedly in operation — with the Serbian Business Registry.

The report also noted that Kwon allegedly contracted a Serbian law firm, Gecic Law, to represent him.

Ognjen Colic, a partner at Gecic Law, reportedly stated that Kwon underwent the standard security checks performed by the firm for every client, including an Interpol website search, which he did not appear on.

“He is not on there — you can check it yourself now.”

Cointelegraph has checked Interpol’s website several times and has been unable to find any information related to Kwon, despite previous reports stating a red notice had been issued for his arrest.

Last week, both Kwon and Han were arrested in Montenegro after allegedly using forged Costa Rican travel documents.

Under the Criminal Code of Montenegro, the offense carries a maximum imprisonment sentence of three years.

A legal representative of Kwon confirmed that he would reportedly appeal the court’s decision to extend detention time for up to 30 days.

Meanwhile, United States prosecutors on March 23 announced that Kwon has been charged with fraud in a New York court.

3 reasons why BNB price risks another 30% decline by January

BNB has entered the breakdown stage of its prevailing ascending triangle pattern alongside some negative fundamentals that can push price further down.

BNB (BNB), the native token of the Binance crypto exchange, is under threat of undergoing a significant price correction in the coming weeks, based on a mix of technical and fundamental indicators.

BNB triangle breakdown continues

From a technical perspective, BNB has entered the breakdown stage of its multi-month ascending triangle pattern, a trend continuation indicator. The breakdown could last until the price reaches the level that comes to be at the length equal to the triangle’s maximum height.

In other words, BNB’s ascending triangle breakdown target is near $170, down about 30% from the current price levels, as shown below. The BNB/USD pair could drop to the said level by January 2023.

*BNBUSD three-day price chart featuring ascending triangle breakdown. Source: TradingView*

For now, BNB’s breakdown move appears to be halting near $222, which has served as a strong support level in recent history, including the declines witnessed in the aftermath of the Terra (LUNA) collapse in May 2022.

BNB could retest the $222 as support, based on a rising wedge technical setup forming on the four-hour chart, as shown below.

*BNB/USD 4H price chart featuring rising wedge breakdown setup. Source: TradingView*

BNB shorts gain momentum

The bearish technical setup for BNB gets further cues from an increasing number of short positions.

Notably, the BNB’s price decline witnessed in recent days has coincided with a rise in its open interest (OI), which reached over $415 millio on Dec. 18, its highest level since November 2021. A rising OI and falling price suggest that traders have been opening new short positions in the BNB market.

*BNB/USD daily price chart versus aggregate open interest. Source: TradingView*

Wick, an options trader-cum-analyst, said BNB could be in “big trouble” if Bitcoin (BTC) falls more. The daily correlation coefficient between BNB and BTC has been mostly positive throughout their history.

“First target is $197,” he tweeted.

Binance insolvency fears drive exchange withdrawals

From a fundamental perspective, BNB looks weaker due to its parent platform Binance’s mounting legal issues. Binance could face potential criminal charges concerning money laundering and sanctions violations.

In addition, the FTX debacle also created skepticism among investors toward Binance. Many speculate that, like FTX, Binance may have used BNB as collateral for loans. While Binance has denied such rumors, its clarification has done little to help BNB snap its downtrend.

*BNB/USD daily price chart. Source: TradingView*

Moreover, the growing uncertainty prompted customers to withdraw $3.6 billion worth of cryptocurrencies in a week, according to data revealed by Nansen on Dec. 13. Later, the exchange halted withdrawals of USD Coin (USDC), a stablecoin backed by its rivals Circle and Coinbase, which exacerbated rumors that it might become insolvent.

*Bitcoin balance on Binance. Source: Glassnode*

On Dec. 14, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao downplayed insolvency risks by noting that the exchange had experienced bigger withdrawals during the Terra and FTX crashes, adding that their ability to meet the withdrawal requests points toward healthy “stress tests.”

“Now deposits are coming back in,” Zhao said.

This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.

Algorithmic stabilization is the key to effective crypto-finance

Crypto needs to move on from the LUNA crash and start trusting algorithmic stablecoins again.

After the collapse of Terraform Labs’ cryptocurrency, Terra (LUNA), and its stablecoin, Terra (UST), the notion of “algorithmic stabilization” has fallen to a low point in popularity, both in the cryptocurrency world and among mainstream observers.

This emotional response, however, is strongly at odds with reality. In fact, algorithmic stabilization of digital assets is a highly valuable and important class of mechanism whose appropriate deployment will be critical if the crypto sphere is to meet its long-term goal of improving the mainstream financial system.

Blockchains, and other similar data structures for secure decentralized computing networks, are not only about money. Due to the historical roots of blockchain tech in Bitcoin (BTC), however, the theme of blockchain-based digital money is woven deep into the ecosystem. Since its inception, a core aspiration of the blockchain space has been the creation of cryptocurrencies that can serve as media of payment and stores of values, independently of the “fiat currencies” created, defended and manipulated by national governments.

So far, however, the crypto world has failed rather miserably at fulfilling its original aspiration of producing tokens that are superior to fiat currency for payment or for value storage.

In fact, this aspiration is eminently fulfillable — but to achieve it in a tractable way requires creative use of algorithmic stabilization, the same sort of mechanism LUNA and other Ponzi-esque projects have abused and thus given an unjustly bad reputation.

Nearly all crypto tokens out there today disqualify themselves as broadly useful tools for payment or value storage for multiple reasons — they are too slow and costly to transact with, and their exchange values are too volatile.

The “slow and costly” problem is gradually being addressed by improvements in underlying technology.

The volatility problem is not caused directly by technological shortcomings but rather by market dynamics. The crypto markets are not that huge relative to the size of global financial systems, and they are heavily traded by speculators, which causes exchange rates to swing wildly up and down.

The best solutions the crypto world has found to this volatility issue so far are “stablecoins,” which are cryptocurrencies with values pinned to fiat currencies like the United States dollar or euro. But there are fundamentally better solutions to be found that avoid any dependency on fiat and bring other advantages via using algorithmic stabilization in judicious (and non-corrupt) ways.

Troubles with stablecoins

Stablecoins like Tether (USDT), BinanceUSD (BUSD) and USD Coin (USDC) have values tied close to that of USD, which means they can be used as a store of value almost as reliably as an ordinary bank account. For people already doing business in the crypto world, there is utility in having wealth stored in a stable form within one’s crypto wallet, so one can easily shift it back and forth between the stable form and various other crypto products.

The largest and most popular stablecoins are “fully backed,” meaning, for example, that each dollar-equivalent unit of USDC corresponds to one U.S. dollar stored in the treasury of the organization backing USDC. So if everyone holding a unit of USDC asked to exchange it for a USD at the same time, the organization would be able to rapidly fulfill all the requests.

Some stablecoins are fractionally backed, meaning that if, say, $100 million in stablecoins have been issued, there may be only $70 million in the corresponding treasury backing it up. In that case, if 70% of the stablecoin holders redeemed their tokens, things would be fine. But if 80% redeemed their tokens, it would become a problem. For FRAX and other similar stablecoins, algorithmic stabilization methods are used to “maintain the peg.” That is, to make sure the exchange value of the stablecoin remains very close to that of the USD peg.

Terra’s UST was an example of a stablecoin whose backing reserve consisted largely of tokens created by the people behind LUNA as governance tokens for their platform, rather than USD or even cryptocurrencies like BTC or Ether (ETH) defined independently of LUNA. When LUNA began to destabilize, the perceived value of their governance token went down, which meant the cash value of their reserves decreased, which caused further destabilization, etc.

While LUNA did use algorithmic stabilization, the core problem with their set-up was not this — it was the presence of vicious circularities in their tokenomics, such as the use of their own governance token as a backing reserve. Like most other flexible financial mechanisms, algorithmic stabilization can be manipulated.

Every major government is explicitly targeting stablecoins in their current regulatory exercises, with the goal of coming up with strict regulations on the issuance and properties of any crypto token that seeks to match the value of fiat currency.

The answer to all these issues is a relatively simple one: Utilize the flexibility of blockchain-based smart-contract infrastructure to create new financial instruments that achieve useful forms of stability without pegging to fiat.

Liberating algorithmic stabilization

“Stability” does not intrinsically mean correlation with fiat currency value. What it should mean for a token to be stable is that year on year, it should cost roughly the same number of tokens to buy the same amount of stuff — carrots, chickens, fencing material, rare earths, accounting services, whatever.

This leads to what my colleagues in the Cogito project are doing, with new tokens that they call “tracercoins,” which really are stablecoins but of a different sort, pinned approximately to quantities other than fiat currencies. For example, the Cogito G-coin is pinned to a synthetic index that measures progress on improving the environment (e.g., global temperature).

Tracercoins can be programmed to track transactions in whatever manner is required by law in the jurisdictions where they are used. But they are not trying to emulate the currency of any particular country, so they will not likely be regulated as strictly as fiat-pinned stablecoins.

Because the pegs for these tokens are synthetic, it’s less of a traumatic market-psychology issue if the tokens vary from their pegs a bit from time to time.

What we have here, then, are stores of value that are potentially better even than the U.S. dollar and other traditional financial assets, in terms of maintaining fundamental value as the world evolves … and that are much less volatile than BTC and other standard crypto assets because of the stabilization built into their tokenomics.

Coupled with modern blockchain efficiency optimizations, we also have a viable payment mechanism that is not tied to the currency of any one country.

Crypto has the potential to fulfill its ambitious long-time aspirations including creating financial tokens serving as better value-stores and payment mechanisms than fiat currencies.

To realize this potential the community needs to set aside fears incurred by the various frauds, scams and badly-architected systems that have plagued the crypto world, and aggressively deploy the best tools at hand — such as fractional reserve-based algorithmic stabilization — in the service of creative designs aimed at the greater good.

Ben Goertzel is the CEO and founder of SingularityNET. He served previously as a director of research at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, as the chief scientist and chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC and as chairman of the OpenCog Foundation. He graduated from Temple University with a PhD in mathematics.

This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal or investment advice. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Terra co-founder Do Kwon hiding out in Serbia, authorities say

South Korean authorities have requested cooperation from the Serbian government in order to bring Kwon back to face charges in South Korea.

The global manhunt for Terraform Labs’ controversial founder and CEO Do Kwon continues to rage on, with South Korean authorities now believing he’s in Serbia after leaving Singapore in September.

According to a Dec. 11 report from Chosun Media, South Korean authorities followed a tip-off concerning Do Kwon’s whereabouts suggesting he is now in Serbia and has been able to confirm it.

“Recently, we obtained intelligence that CEO Kwon was in Serbia, and it was found to be true,” an official told the outlet.

The report also states that South Korea’s Ministry of Finance “is in the process of requesting cooperation from the Serbian government” as part of the investigation.

South Korean authorities have been on the hunt for Do Kwon since Terra’s collapse, but haven’t seemed to have had much luck pinpointing his location until now.

The 31-year-old was understood to have moved to Singapore toward the end of April, just before the Terra ecosystem’s shock collapse.

On Sept. 14, the Seoul Southern District Prosecutor’s Office’s Financial and Securities Criminal Unit issued an arrest warrant against Kwon for allegedly violating South Korean capital markets laws.

Around that time, authorities in Singapore confirmed that Kwon was no longer in the country, and was understood to have flown to Dubai in transit to a new unknown destination.

Shortly after that, on Sept. 26, Interpol also reportedly issued a “Red Notice” against Kwon. As of Dec. 11, however, Do Kwon doesn’t appear to have been added to Interpol’s Red Notice database on the website.

On Oct. 6, South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued an order for Kwon to surrender his passport. The ministry added that failure to comply would result in the cancellation of his passport altogether.

Later that month, prosecutors in South Korea c onfirmed reports that Do Kwon had flown to Dubai for a possible stopover before heading to another destination — which, as it turns out, might have been Serbia.

If Do Kwon turns out to be in Serbia, it remains to be seen what, if any, legal strings can be pulled from South Korea to try to extradite the Terraform Labs founder.

While South Korea has entered into a bilateral extradition treaty with 31 countries, Serbia is not among them. However, South Korea has also entered into a much broader multilateral extradition treaty with the Council of Europe, to which Serbia is a signatory.

Kwon has maintained that he is not “on the run” and has been “making zero effort to hide.” He’s continued to be active on social media over the last few months.

The collapse of the Terra ecosystem in May was partly triggered by the depegging of its algorithmic stablecoin Terra USD Classic, USTC (formerly UST), which in turn brought down its sister asset Luna Classic, LUNC (formerly LUNA) by nearly 100%.

Cointelegraph reached out to representatives for Terraform Labs for comment but did not receive an immediate response.

FTX’s Bankman-Fried to face market manipulation probe, Do Kwon chimes in

As part of a broader inquiry into FTX’s collapse, federal prosecutors are looking at the role that FTX and Alameda may have played in the fall of Terra.

United States federal prosecutors have reportedly begun investigating whether the collapse of the Terra ecosystem was in fact triggered by market manipulation tactics by former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.

According to a Dec. 7 report from The New York Times (NYT), the prosecutors — as part of a broader inquiry into FTX’s own collapse — are investigating whether Bankman-Fried’s empire intentionally caused a flood of “sell” orders on Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD Classic (USTC), formerly TerraUSd (UST).

The sudden increase in UST sell orders were said to make it difficult to match them with corresponding “buy” orders, which in turn forced more downward price pressure on UST, causing it to depeg from its intended 1:1 ratio with the U.S. dollar.

The events also led to the fall of Terra’s native token, Terra Classic (LUNC), formerly LUNA, as the two cryptocurrencies were designed to be linked.

But while no one has been able to precisely determine the root cause behind the collapse of LUNC and USTC in May, it is known that the majority of the USTC sell orders came from Bankman-Fried’s trading firm Alameda research, according to the NYT.

A person with knowledge on the matter also told NYT that Alameda Researched also placed a big bet on the price of LUNC falling.

Like with most comments Bankman-Fried has shared since FTX’s collapse, the former CEO claimed that he was “not aware of any market manipulation and certainly never intended to engage in market manipulation,” according to NYT.

“To the best of my knowledge, all transactions were for investment or for hedging,” he added.

Responding to the recent report, Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon shared his thoughts on the matter to his 1 million Twitter followers in a Nov. 8 tweet, who suggested it was time for Genesis Trading come clean about an alleged $1 billion loan in UST to “SBF or Alameda” shortly before Kwon’s Terra ecosystem crashed.

I think the time has come for @GenesisTrading to reveal if they provided the $1B UST shortly before the crash to SBF or Alameda – the purchase from LFG was represented as stemming from “interest to participate in the Terra Defi ecosystem” – not to provide ammo for a peg attack

— Do Kwon (@stablekwon) December 8, 2022

Kwon also stated that a large currency contraction that UST underwent in Feb. 2021 was started by Alameda “when they sold 500mm UST in minutes to drain its curve pools during the MIM crisis.”

“What’s done in darkness will come to light,” Kwon added on the matter.

Terra developers propose revised 95M LUNA ecosystem funding program

It is an update to the original 100 million ecosystem funding proposal, which Terra developers say did not fit the community’s needs.

On Monday, developers of the Terra ecosystem — consisting of Luna Classic (LUNC), which was formerly known as LUNA, TerraUSD Classic (USTC) and Luna 2.0 (LUNA) — proposed a revised expansion program for allocating 95 million LUNA ($248 million). As told by Terra, the new proposal is designed to incentivize development in the Terra ecosystem and fix issues in the original proposal.

In the original plan, around 10% of LUNA’s total supply, or 100 million LUNA, would be allocated to the ecosystem, with 80% of this amount going to developer mining rewards. However, Terra staff explaine that there are only a handful of projects with total value locked on the protocol, and such lack of competition would not result in the proper distribution of mining revenue.

Under the new proposal, developer mining rewards would decrease from approximately 80 million LUNA to 20 million LUNA. On the other hand, 50 million LUNA would be reallocated as liquidity mining rewards to incentivize building decentralized exchanges on the Terra ecosystem. Another 20 million LUNA would be given as developer grants, with a maximum recipient amount of 125,000 LUNA per project per year. Finally, 5 million LUNA will be given to users to incentivize traction.

1/ Attention #LUNAtics, a new proposal has just been posted on Agora outlining a new ecosystem expansion program – The Terra Expedition https://t.co/wW92766GXj

— Terra Powered by LUNA (@terra_money) October 17, 2022

A seven-member committee consisting of TerraForm Labs (TFL) employees, community leaders and external experts will oversee the allocation of funds. The appointment period will be one year, with non-TFL employees in the group receiving a monthly compensation of 1,000 LUNA. Although the committee members will vote to decide on funding proposals, the committee, itself, will have discretionary authority over the allocation of funds.

Meanwhile, the treasury will be managed by a separate group consisting of two validators, two community members and three members of TFL. A few months earlier, the Terra Luna ecosystem suffered a devastating $40 billion collapse, with the algorithmic LUNC-USTC coin pair spiraling out of control as part of a week of intense sell-offs. Since then, the ecosystem has partially stabilized but remains well below of pre-crash market valuation. According to DefiLlama, TVL on Luna currently stands at $51 million.

Terraform Labs claims case against Do Kwon is ‘highly politicized:’ WSJ

A spokesperson for the company behind Terra said it believes prosecutors heeled to public pressure and expanded the definition of a security after its associated cryptocurrencies collapsed.

Terraform Labs, the company behind the development of the Terra blockchain said South Korea’s case against its co-founder Do Kwon has become political, alleging prosecutors expanded the definition of a security in response to public pressure.

“We believe that this case has become highly politicized, and that the actions of the Korean prosecutors demonstrate unfairness and a failure to uphold basic rights guaranteed under Korean law,” a Terraform Labs spokesman said to the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 28.

South Korean prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Kwon on Sept. 14 for violations of the countries capital markets laws, but Terraform Labs laid out a defense arguing Terra, now known with its new token, Luna Classic (LUNC), isn’t legally a security, meaning it isn’t covered by capital markets laws.

The spokesman alleged prosecutors of expanding the definition of a security due to intense public pressure from the collapse of Terra and its connected algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD (UST), now known as TerraUSD Classic (USTC):

“We believe, as do most in industry, that Luna Classic is not, and has never been, a security, despite any changes in interpretation that Korean financial officials may have recently adopted.”

The argument by Terraform Labs’ stems from the unclear regulatory status of cryptocurrencies and the companies who create and issue them.

Currently, capital market and electronic securities’ systems in the country don’t include a legal definition of non-standardized securities issued through a blockchain.

The country is moving to regulate the space with its financial regulator, the Financial Services Commission (FSC) preparing guidelines for security tokens by the end of 2022.

A leaked government report in May further revealed South Korea’s plans to roll out a crypto framework by 2024.

Kwon’s whereabouts remain unknown and Terraform Labs did not comment on his location citing physical security risks, but Kwon says he’s not making an effort to hide even after a notice was sent to global authorities by Interpol.

Breaking: Interpol ‘Red Notice’ issued for Do Kwon — South Korea prosecutors

The Terraform Labs co-founder faces charges in South Korea relating to the crash of the Terra ecosystems’ cryptocurrencies.

Interpol has reportedly issued a “Red Notice” to law enforcement worldwide for the arrest of Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon.

South Korean prosecutors in Seoul on Monday told Bloomberg the international policing organization issued the notice in response to charges Kwon faces in South Korea related to the collapse of the Terra ecosystem.

The news comes only a week after South Korean prosecutors reportedly asked Interpol to issue a “Red Notice” for Kwon on Sept. 19.

A Red notice is a “request to law enforcement worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest a person pending extradition, surrender, or similar legal action” according to the Interpol website.

It also comes less than two weeks after South Korean authorities issued an arrest warrant for Kwon and five other associates for alleged violations of the country’s capital markets laws.

Kwon was previously believed to have been residing in Singapore, but local authorities said on Sept. 17 he wasn’t in the country, with Kwon saying hours later he wasn’t “on the run,” though he didn’t reveal his location.

The Terra ecosystem Kwon co-founded crashed after its algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) (now TerraUSD Classic (USTC)) lost its United States dollar peg in May causing billions of dollars worth of liquidations across the cryptocurrency market.