The Crypto Cult of Do Kwon: ‘If It Was a Ponzi Scheme, They Did a Good Job’

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When he took the stage a half-hour or so later, though — before the 300-capacity crowd in front of a backdrop of the Manhattan skyline — any hint of caution was gone. “What we need to remember always is our true North Star of why we started this in the first place, and that is to make sure that our money is the most decentralized and the most useful on the face of this fucking planet!” Kwon shouted to huge applause.

Terraform Labs came into being in the wake of Basis’s failure. The idea behind this new venture was to create two interrelated digital currencies that had vastly different purposes but were designed to balance each other out. One was TerraUSD, called UST in shorthand. This was a so-called stablecoin, made to stay pegged at a value of $1. Stablecoins, which date back to 2014, are used by investors to buy into and cash out of cryptocurrency markets.

Internally, Kwon was a brash figure even in the world of massively wealthy crypto founders. Norman, the Terra developer, remembered how Kwon belittled an engineer over a Discord channel in December after a glitch had accidentally cashed out about 250 Terra holders. “He was extremely impatient and rude and seemed like he was annoyed at having to be there,” he said. “Kept telling the organizer he needs to speak in shorter sentences to not waste his time.

But on March 7, things started to fall apart. At the time, Terraform Labs was essentially upgrading its systems, switching from a program that had a reserve of tradable UST to a new one that didn’t appear to have any, according to research from Onramp Academy. In doing so, Kwon’s own company made $150 million in UST disappear — precipitating a $350 million drawdown soon after. If you were a crypto trader, all of a sudden you would see that half a billion UST tokens had just disappeared.

DILIPtheCHERIAN KevinTDugan 8.42 Highly poisonous chemical fumes causing chemical burns in mouth and chemical fumes causing sedation are being released into my premises $GE GE MeToo whistle-blower

jasonbelldata KevinTDugan surely this happened on May 7th not March 7th

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