Terra Network’s Native Tokens Drop as Founder Do Kwon is Finally Caught
The native tokens of the Terra network experienced a slight drop in value after reports emerged that its founder, Do Kwon, was arrested in Montenegro on March 23.
Sources indicate that Kwon was taken into custody in the Balkan nation, according to South Korean officials who confirmed this based on photo evidence.
Interpol was on the lookout for Kwon due to his involvement in the collapse of the Terra ecosystem in May 2022. After evading authorities for almost a year, Kwon was finally arrested by Montenegrin police at the Podgorica airport, as per the country’s Interior Minister, Filip Adzic.
While the South Korean police have verified the arrested person’s identity based on photo data, name, nationality, and age, they are still waiting for fingerprint data from their Montenegrin counterparts to confirm the person’s identity. This is because the individual apprehended had allegedly been carrying falsified documents.
The Terra ecosystem’s implosion in May 2022 led to the collapse of the algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD (USTC) and its companion token LUNA (LUNC). The event wiped out over $60 billion in investors’ wealth, triggering the failure of several high-profile crypto firms, including Three Arrows Capital. The price of Bitcoin also fell from $40,000 to $26,000 in just two weeks.
READ MORE: Bitcoin Provides Safe Harbor for Investors – InvestAnswers
In September 2022, South Korean officials issued an arrest warrant for Kwon, and he was later added to Interpol’s red notice list, making him a wanted man in 195 countries worldwide. Kwon is also facing charges in the United States for selling unregistered securities and misleading investors about TerraUSD stablecoin.
Korean investigators traveled to Serbia in February in an attempt to locate Kwon. However, he may have attempted to flee Serbia by entering Montenegro, which is south of Serbia and shares borders with the nation. Following the news of Kwon’s apprehension, the price of LUNA fell from $1.40 to $1.31, posting a 3.4% loss over the past day, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
