The wife of Terraform Labs PTE Ltd. chief executive officer Do Kwon has sought police protection after alleging that a yet-to-be-identified individual broke into their apartment building in South Korea, local police told Forkast.
Kwon’s wife requested emergency protection after the incident on Thursday evening, police in Seoul’s Seongdong-gu district told Forkast. She has subsequently been provided with security, they added.
An unidentified individual allegedly entered the apartment complex located in Seongsu-dong after waiting for a resident to open the gate with a code, Kwon’s wife alleged. The individual then rang the doorbell and knocked on the door to Kwon’s home, she added. After she answered the door, the individual reportedly asked if Kwon was available and left when she answered in the negative, Kwon’s wife alleged.
The wife reportedly told the police that the location of their private residence has been made public after Kwon’s crypto business started going awry. The Asia Pacific headquarters of Terraform Labs is in Singapore, according to its LinkedIn page.
The police told Forkast on Friday that they were still trying to trace the individual on possible charges of breaking and entering. This pursuit is based on what has been alleged, police say, though it could not be immediately ascertained if the individual had invested in any of Kwon’s beleaguered cryptocurrency initiatives.
See related article: Binance pulls the plug on TerraUSD (UST) trading pairs
The Firm
The development comes as Kwon finds himself embroiled in controversial allegations following what some media have called the “Lehman Brothers of crypto.” Terraform Lab’s TerraUSD (UST) lost its U.S. dollar peg earlier this week and slumped to US$0.04 on Friday morning Hong Kong time, according to CoinGecko. The algorithm-based stablecoin has lost some US$16.6 billion in market capitalization.
The firm sought to peg the UST against the greenback by backing it against LUNA, a proprietary token.
But LUNA’s supply rose 20-fold in four days through Thursday, according to analysis by The Block’s Tim Copeland. The supply has since ballooned to 6.91 trillion from 775.69 billion on May 10, according to data from Terrascope, a tool built to track the Terra Money ecosystem.
The supply increased as holders of the UST redeemed the stablecoin for LUNA to sell the latter on the open market. This increased the supply of the token, pushing the price of the token further down. In turn, this created a vicious cycle as UST holders had to redeem for even more LUNA than earlier.
See related article: Is Terra — whose LUNA coin is now at another all-time high — really where the smart money is?
LUNA now trades at US$0.037, down 100% in the last seven days, according to Terrascope data. It had touched an all-time high of US$116.29 about a month earlier.
Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, on Friday said it will delist a number of trading pairs linked to UST and LUNA, accelerating the downfall of Terraform-LUNA. The debacle has led to cascading turmoil in the cryptocurrency market, already browbeaten by the selloff in risk assets. Bitcoin dipped below US$27,000 on Thursday before recovering to above the US$30,000 mark on late Friday Hong Kong time.
Risky business
Despite multiple desperate attempts, the UST has yet to recover its peg to the dollar. Meanwhile, several people have taken to social media platforms to disparage Kwon, claiming to have lost their life savings.
Kwon himself has gone silent.
He stopped his prolific tweeting with the last Tweet on Wednesday promising LUNA holders recovery.
See related article: Terra shuts down indefinitely after coming back online; LUNA, UST still on life support
