Alias:

Reward:

This subject is currently in U.S. federal custody serving a 15-year sentence. The Bureau maintains this profile as an archival reference. The standing 1,000,000 $MBI reward does not apply to confirmed-custody Archive subjects.

Remarks:

Kwon maintained an aggressive, often mocking public persona on Twitter (now X), where he dismissed critics as "poor" and characterized Terra's economic backing as "unbreakable." Even after Terra's May 2022 collapse, he attempted to launch "Terra 2.0" and continued posting publicly while a fugitive. Judge Engelmayer described the case as "fraud on an epic, generational scale" and noted that "real people lost 40 billion dollars in real money, not some paper loss."

Caution:

Terraform Labs marketed TerraUSD ($UST) as a decentralized, algorithmically-stabilized US dollar peg, supposedly maintained through a mint-and-burn arbitrage mechanism with the sister token LUNA. U.S. prosecutors found that when $UST first lost its peg in May 2021, an investment firm contracted by Terraform Labs secretly purchased $UST to manufacture an appearance of self-correction — a fact Kwon then used to publicly claim the protocol had "restored its value" through its own algorithm. When the peg failed permanently in May 2022, the death spiral wiped out approximately $40 billion in value across the Terra ecosystem and triggered the broader 2022 "crypto winter" contagion that ultimately swept Celsius, Three Arrows Capital, Voyager, and FTX into collapse.

After the May 2022 collapse, Kwon fled South Korea, where authorities had issued an arrest warrant. He was apprehended in March 2023 at Podgorica Airport in Montenegro while attempting to fly to Dubai using a falsified Costa Rican passport. He served four months in Montenegro for document forgery, then was extradited to the United States on December 31, 2024 following a 17-month custodial battle between U.S. and South Korean authorities. He pleaded guilty in August 2025 to two counts (wire fraud and conspiracy to defraud), with seven other counts dropped under the plea agreement. On December 11, 2025, Judge Paul Engelmayer sentenced him to 15 years — exceeding both the prosecution's 12-year recommendation and the defense's 5-year request. After serving half the sentence, Kwon may apply for transfer to South Korea, where he faces a separate trial with potential exposure of up to 40 additional years.