A group of South Korean officials traveled to Serbia to try to find Do Kwon, co-founder of Terra Terraform Labs, which developed the now-collapsed Terra Luna and TerraUSD stablecoins.
According to a Bloomberg report on Tuesday, a team of South Korean officials traveled to Serbia last week to seek help in finding Daoquan. The Seoul prosecutors' office reportedly confirmed the news, noting that a senior official from the justice ministry also accompanied the delegation.
In early December, South Korean prosecutors claimed Do Kwon was "hiding" in Serbia and demanded that police in the European country hand him over to them. He moved to Serbia via Dubai in September after leaving South Korea for Singapore around the time of the crash, prosecutors said.
It's worth noting that Kwon's South Korean passport has been revoked, which, at least in theory -- means he can't travel abroad from where he is currently. Arrest warrants have been issued for him and a number of other Terraform executives, and Interpol has issued a red notice calling for international police to arrest Kwon.
Quan is wanted for violating the Capital Markets Act and committing fraud, charges he denies and calls "politically motivated". But so far he has neither confirmed nor denied claims that he has settled in Serbia.
Some experts have previously claimed that Serbia could be a potential hiding place for Kwon because it never had an extradition treaty with South Korea. Without this, experts say South Korean prosecutors could be in trouble.
"In order for South Korean prosecutors to secure an arrest, Serbia has to issue an extradition order, and extradition needs to be mutually beneficial. Serbia remains an unprecedented country in this regard," Seung Jae-Hyeon, a research fellow at the Korea Institute for Criminal Justice Policy, said in December.
Kwon is the co-founder and CEO of Singapore-based Terraform Labs, the parent company of crashed stablecoin TerraUSD and cryptocurrency Luna. The TerraUSD stablecoin aims to maintain a constant value of $1 through a combination of algorithms and trader incentives involving sister token Luna.
However, the so-called algorithmic stablecoin lost its peg to the U.S. dollar last May after a wave of sell-offs in the cryptocurrency market. While Terraform Labs managed to partially repair the peg by purchasing $2B of UST, the ongoing sell-off drained those funds, overinflated UST’s sister token, LUNA, and sent the price of LUNA and UST plummeting.
The unprecedented collapse of the Terra ecosystem cost the cryptocurrency market an estimated $40 billion, imposing huge losses on the millions of investors who had put their life savings into the token.
