By
Chimamanda U. Martha
April 19th, 2024
Following the request from South Korean prosecutors, Interpol is now on the lookout for Terra founder Do Kwon who’s been on the run recently.
Prosecutors in South Korea have been actively looking for Terra founder Do Kwon over their ongoing investigation and collapse of the Terra ecosystem. As per the latest development, Interpol has issued a red corner notice for arresting Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon.
Interpol Interested in the Do Kwon and UST Case
On Monday, September 25, prosecutors in Seoul updated on the recent development. The Terra founder is currently facing major charges in South Korea relating to the $40 billion wipeout of all cryptocurrencies that he created.
Earlier this month on September 14, the South Korean court issued a warrant for arresting the Terra founder. However, days later Do Kwon said that he was not on the run. In a Twitter thread earlier this month, Kwon stated:
“We are in the process of defending ourselves in multiple jurisdictions – we have held ourselves to an extremely high bar of integrity, and look forward to clarifying the truth over the next few months”.
But South Korean prosecutors said that the entrepreneur was “not cooperating,” and was “obviously on the run”. The South Korean prosecutors asked Interpol to issue a red corner notice against him. The current location of Terraform founder Do Kwon remains unknown. Police in Singapore, where Terraform Labs was based, said that Kwon was not found in the city-state.
Along with Kwon, even other Terraform Labs executives have been facing allegations of breaching capital market laws in South Korea.
What Does This Episode Mean for Crypto Industry?
One of the spokespeople for the South Korean prosecutors told TechCrunch that the notice against Do Kwon can set a wrong precedence for the crypto industry and hurt innovation. This would be especially true if Do Kwon didn’t knowingly hurt crypto investors.
In one of the recent podcasts, Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner of crypto investment fund Dragonfly, said:
“Having met Do Kwon … leaving how he is a person aside … I think the criminalization of Terra is a dangerous precedent”.
The collapse of Terraform’s UST stablecoin has been a case study for the entire crypto market. Recently, the Houses of Financial Services Committee put forward a proposal of issuing a two-year ban on stablecoins like Terra. Thus, the regulator is trying to ban algorithmic stablecoins whose value depends on another crypto in the same ecosystem.