As the trial of ex-crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried grinds on in the US, spare a thought for Do Kwon. He might need a nickel, too. Kwon is the Korean-born inventor of TerraUSD and Luna, a so-called stablecoin and a related cryptocurrency, respectively. There was nothing stable about either of them; both collapsed to near zero in value in the spring of last year. Kwon went on the run, spending time in Serbia before being arrested in March on an Interpol warrant at Podgorica airport in Montenegro, where a private jet was fuelled and waiting. He’s now serving a four-month sentence in Podgorica for using a fake passport, after which he’ll likely be extradited to the US. The WSJ has a wild account of his fall from the cryptocracy and his pursuit by dogged South Korean police, including the detail that he once lived in a Singapore high-rise with a private cantilevered pool. But the strangest thing about the story is what it doesn’t say. Despite everything, crypto lives. If you bought 10 Bitcoin five years ago and held on, you’d be sitting on a roughly 600 per cent gain.
