Overview

Kwon Do-hyung (Korean: 권도형; born 6 September 1991), commonly known as Do Kwon, is a South Korean convicted felon, former businessman and software engineer. He was the co-founder and CEO of Terraform Labs, the parent company of crashed stablecoin TerraUSD and cryptocurrency Luna. TerraUSD and Luna collapsed in May 2022, wiping out almost $45 billion market capitalization in one week and causing hundreds of billions in losses in the larger crypto market.

On 23 March 2023, he was arrested in Montenegro while attempting to travel to Dubai using falsified documents. Following his arrest, he was charged by a US federal grand jury of eight counts, including securities fraud, commodities fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy. He was extradited to the United States, where he pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison in December 2025.

Early life and education

Do Kwon was born in Seoul, South Korea, on 6 September 1991. He attended Daewon Foreign Language High School in Seoul and received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2015.

Career

After graduating in 2015, Kwon worked briefly as a software engineer for both Microsoft and Apple.

In January 2016, he returned to South Korea to develop and found his startup, Anyfi. It was later discovered that the company at which he was CEO had received approximately $600,000 worth of government funding during its initial stages. That involved a conflict of interest, because the funding was approved through a Korean incubator company run by one of the co-founder's parents.

Furthermore, internal investigations from the Korean Ministry of SMEs and Startups revealed that the company had received failing grades in initial evaluation reports, and that five counts of the inappropriate use of funding for personnel expenses were exposed, although the money was reported to have been retrieved by the Ministry.

Terraform Labs

In January 2018, Do Kwon co-founded Terraform Labs Pte. Ltd. with entrepreneur Daniel Shin. Later in 2018, Terraform Labs released a cryptocurrency called Luna. Terraform began selling its stablecoin, TerraUSD (UST), in 2020. The Terra blockchain, which included both UST and Luna, had stable mining incentives that were purported to create an elastic monetary policy, alongside an efficient fiscal policy, to counteract potential low adoption and limited use cases.

The UST stablecoin used an algorithm linked to the Luna supply to maintain a value of around $1, unlike other coins that were pegged to cash. The value of Luna eventually reached over $116 in April 2022.

During his time at Terraform Labs, Kwon also worked on various blockchain projects, including Mirror, Prism, Astroport, and Anchor. The Mirror token, known as MIR, ran on a decentralized finance platform related to Terra. MIR allowed people to disregard restrictions on stocks and other assets by making it easier to create and trade synthetic versions.

Following the crash of sister currencies Luna and TerraUSD in May 2022, Terraform Labs began trading a new cryptocurrency termed Luna 2.0 in June 2022. However, the release of Luna 2.0, later called LUNA on trading platforms, led to push-back from investors and critics. As a result of the crash, TerraUSD and Luna are now referred to as TerraClassicUSD and LUNC, respectively.

Regulatory issues

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began an investigation of Terraform Labs in June 2022 to determine if the marketing of the TerraUSD stablecoin violated federal regulations on securities and investment products. Following the crash in May 2022, the SEC investigation seeks to determine whether TerraUSD and its underlying algorithms worked as marketed, or if it violated federal investor protection regulations. Despite Terraform Labs being based in Singapore, TerraUSD falls under SEC's regulations as Americans bought the token to fund businesses or seek profit.

In February 2023, the SEC charged Kwon and Terraform Labs with fraud.

On 17 May 2022, members of the Korean parliament and government authorities called for a parliamentary hearing regarding Terraform Labs and its founder Kwon, citing the lack of regulatory framework as the main reason for the investigation.

On 18 May 2022, following investigations led by the National Tax Service of Korea, Terraform Labs founders Kwon and Daniel Shin were asked to pay additional taxes worth approximately $100 million in December 2021. However, the two founders refused to pay on the grounds that the subsidiaries Terraform Labs Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) and Terraform Labs Virgin Islands are not Korean entities.

Regardless, the National Tax Service has claimed that since "the founders had made practical management decisions" during their time as official residents in Korea, the transfer of funds between the subsidiaries and their profits made by each entity need to obey Korean jurisdiction.