Do Kwon made millions when his Luna cryptocurrency became one of the biggest in the world. But last year his reputation was in tatters after the collapse of his blockchain eco-system.
So what is Do Kwon’s net worth now, and what’s the story behind his rise and fall?
Who is Do Kwon?
Do Kwon, whose full name is Kwon Do-hyung, is a now-disgraced South Korean entrepreneur and cryptocurrency inventor.
Born in Seoul on September 6, 1991, Do Kwon spent his childhood growing up in the Asian city before moving to America to go to university.
Highly intelligent, the Korean was accepted at Stanford University, the prestigious and highly selective college in California, where he studied computer science.
After graduating in 2015, Do Kwon took on a job as an engineer for Apple. Just three months later he quit to take on a job with Microsoft.
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However, his time working at big tech firms in the US didn’t last long. Shortly after joining Microsoft the Korean moved back home, frustrated by work.
“I was just working on side-projects full time, doing nothing,” he said in one interview about his brief career in California after graduating.
After returning to South Korea he chose to start work on his own company: Anyfi.
The tech communication firm claimed it would help to give better internet access to those without broadband by using a mesh network to relay bandwidth.
Despite raising $1 million in investment, Do Kwon spent less than two years at the firm he founded before stepping aside to try something new.
In January 2018 Do Kwon started working on a cryptocurrency white paper with college classmate Nicholas Platias. Working from an AirBnB the pair set out the roadmap for a blockchain payment platform called Terraform Labs.
The company was able to raise finance rapidly – even before it had properly been set up.
Terraform Labs raised $150 million in initial seed funding, with another $32 million being injected just six months later.
In 2019 Terraform Labs then chose to launch its own cryptocurrency: Luna.
The stable coin was designed to link Luna to TerraUSD. The idea behind the coin was that an algorithm would ensure that TerraUSD was always pegged to the value of the US dollar.
If $1 of TerraUSD was burnt, $1 of Luna would be minted at the same time, and visa-versa. The two would always remain in equilibrium helping to avoid the huge price fluctuations which have marred crypto for years.
Do Kwon was hailed as a major crypto success story. In the same year that Luna was released, the entrepreneur was listed on Forbes’ 30-under-30 list.
By 2022 Luna was one of the top five cryptocurrencies in the world and had a marked cap of $45 billion.
However, in May 2022 Do Kwon’s crypto empire collapsed. On May 7 $4 billion worth of TerraUSD was dumped. The unprecedented scale of the withdrawals led to the coin decoding from the US dollar, crashing the entire system.
Following the collapse an arrest warrant was issued for Do Kwon by the South Korean authorities. He was accused of fraud and breaches of South Korea’s capital markets law.
America’s Securities and Exchange Commission have also charged him with fraud.
Do Kwon was arrested in March 2023, after allegedly being caught attempting to travel to Dubai using falsified passports.
He denies all the charges against him.
What is Do Kwon’s net worth?
Do Kwon’s net worth was virtually wiped out then Luna collapsed in May 2022.
Before the cryptocurrency’s crash, the entrepreneur was thought to be worth as much as $50 billion.
Do Kwon admitted he had lost almost all of his money in the saga the month after Terra’s crypto eco-system crumbled.
But he added: “This doesn’t bother me… I live a fairly frugal life.”
Do Kwon’s assets have been frozen by the South Korean authorities as part of their investigation into his conduct at Terraform Labs.