South Korean prosecutors say they expect Do Kwon to be extradited to Seoul soon

OFFICIALS in Seoul say they expect Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon to be handed over to South Korea soon.

Prosecutors are waiting on authorities in Montenegro where the Stanford University graduate was detained last March after being found in the Baltic nation attempting to board an aircraft with a fake passport after fleeing his homeland in 2022.

The 32-year-old is also wanted in the US, but it is understood the Montenegro government has overturned an earlier decision that agreed to hand Kwon over to Washington, with Kwon himself reportedly asking to be sent to Seoul.

South Korea's justice minister Park Sung-jae says he is now waiting for his counterparts in Podgorica to make contact and arrange extradition.

"I understand there's not a lot left in Kwon Do-hyung's detention period so whatever measures need to be taken swiftly," Park said.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission had scheduled a civil trial for March 25 when Kwon was meant to be facing fraud charges. The SEC filed papers against Kwon in May 2022 following the collapse of Terra and its associated Luna token.

It is estimated the downfall of Luna led to more than $40 billion losses in the cryptocurrency markets.

In a YouTube interview in 2022, Kwon was probed about the prospect of spending time in jail over his part in the scandal, to which he responded by saying “life is long”.

In the months leading up to the collapse, Kwon mocked global financial experts who warned that Terra’s business model was badly flawed.

When critics – including UK economist Frances Coppola – lambasted Terra’s ‘algorithmic stablecoin’, Kwon responded publicly by labelling them ‘cockroaches’.

In other unseemly spats he said he drew entertainment from watching companies collapse, before answering a question on where yield reserves from the ‘Anchor Protocol’ were coming from with a bizarre “Your mom, obviously”.

At the time, both Terra USD and Luna had a combined value of more than $60 billion.

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Kwon has denied wrongdoing. He also faces related U.S. criminal charges, and has been held in Montenegro since his arrest last March.

Kwon is separately under indictment in South Korea which has also sought his arrest.

Kwon had appealed a ruling by a court in Montenegro's capital of Podgorica that he should be extradited to the United States instead of his native South Korea, which he preferred.

Legal analysts have said Kwon would face a relatively lighter sentence if convicted in South Korea where the longest prison term sentence for financial crimes is 40 years.

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