Co -founder and former president of Terry, to Kwon, pleaded guilty. In return, he can count on a shorter sentence.
He pleads guilty to Kwon
The US District Prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, announced that he pleaded to Hyeong Kwon (to Kwon) to the allegation of establishing a conspiracy, which was aimed at committing fraud related to securities, and the second – to commit financial fraud.
Terra was advertised by Kwon as an independent, decentralized financial ecosystem, using blockchain technology and offering various financial products, including its own token. However, investors and users of Terraform did not realize that everything was defective, and Stablecoin himself an algorithmic project, which was its core, could suddenly lose value – lose connection with the American dollar. Ultimately, the latter took place, which led to the fall of Terra and declines in the wider cryptocurrency market.
He used the technological promises and investment euphoria around cryptocurrencies to commit one of the greatest fraud in history
Clayton said. He added that the businessman managed to collect “tens of billions of USD” from the market and put them in the “Terraform ecosystem, promising self -clinging Stablecoin”.
Before the markets discovered the instability of the ecosystem, it was too late: the system broke down, and investors around the world suffered billions of USD losses
– he summed up.
He received financing from several investment companies from the USA and other countries to Kwon. The peak of Terraform’s popularity fell at the beginning of 2022, when the market capitalization of the mouth and Luna – successively Stablecoin and the token of the project – exceeded USD 50 billion. In the spring of 2022, the mouth lost the exchange rate to USD.
Odyssey to Kwon
When the project fell to Kwon, he escaped from South Korea. And he was hiding. At the end of March 2023 he was captured in Europe – he wanted to fly out of Montenegro using a false passport. Shortly afterwards, the US authorities submitted an application for its extradition. South Korean services were trying to take care of the same, but ultimately the Americans took over.
In the US he is now threatened with up to 12 years. Initially, the verdict was to be much higher, but the conciliatory settlement and confession to guilty shorten the penalty.
