Who is Do Kwon, the ‘lunatic’ who created a $60 billion cryptocurrency that collapsed in days?

The eccentric 30-year-old creator of the UST and Luna cryptocurrencies solidified his status as one of the most recognizable figures in the industry for all the wrong reasons.

TerraUSD plummeted to as low as 13 cents last week and dropped to as low as nine cents this week. The collapse of Luna resulted in massive losses for investors.

Who is Kwon, how did he come to oversee a project that rose so rapidly and collapsed so fast, and how did they compare him to Ken Lay?

Early life

He was born in South Korea in 1991. He graduated with a computer science degree from the university in 2015. A public website created by Do Kwon says he worked at Microsoft and Apple, but little is known about his college years.

The failed stable coin project Basis Cash was created by Do Kwon under the name Rick and Morty. His other project UST was similar to the failed algorithmic stable coin. Basis Cash was designed to maintain a tie to the U.S. dollar through code instead of holding reserves in cash and other riskier assets as backing. Basis Cash never reached its dollar value, and its developers abandoned it.

Raising capital

Do Kwon and Daniel Shin founded Terraform Labs. Terraform began to see interest from investors. The startup raised $150 million from investors.

According to VentureBeat, Terraform Labs raised $32 million in August to create a modern financial system. The company had high-profile backers like the investment arms of four of the six largest exchanges.

The New York Times reported that between the years of 2018 and 2021, investors put more than $200 million into projects built using Luna's underlying technology.

The investors lost a lot after UST and Luna collapsed. After the crash, the investment in Luna was worth less than $3,000, according to the CEO. Some investors did not lose out after the crash. The New York Times reported that Pantera Capital earned $170 million after selling 80% of its Luna holdings.

Rise to fame

Forbes reported at the time that he had attracted 40 million users to work with the company, which was why he made the list. Luna reached a high of $119 in April, but it was only at the end of December.

Following concerns about how his stable coin would keep its dollar peg, Kwon announced that he would buy $10 billion in Bitcoins.

Do Kwon’s bad mouthing

He was always critical of his competitors and detractors on social media.

Do Kwon criticized investors who were putting money into other stablecoin projects, saying that UST was the oldest and most widely used stable coin in existence.

He said "Bow before the king."

He had a penchant for saying that Luna would stay poor if they didn't support him or his cryptocurrencies.

I don't debate the poor on the internet, and sorry, I don't have any change for her.

About a week before Terra lost its peg to the U.S. dollar, Kwon bragged that there was also entertainment in watching companies die.