The co-founder of Terraform Laboratories and former fugitive Make Kwon was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the fraud that led to the collapse of 40 billion US dollars of the company in 2022 and triggered a series of cascading crises in the world of cryptocurrencies.
Kwon, 34, was sentenced at a hearing Thursday in New York by U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer, ending U.S. efforts to prosecute the crypto entrepreneur following a legal battle to extradite him from Montenegro, where he was imprisoned for using a fake passport. He still faces fraud charges in his home country of South Korea.
Kwon’s prison sentence comes at a time when the Trump administration has reduced oversight of crypto markets.. On October 23, President Donald Trump pardoned the founder of Binance, Zhao Changpengwho was convicted of failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program at the world’s largest cryptocurrency brokerage.
“This was a fraud on an epic generational scale,” Engelmayer told Kwon. “In the history of federal criminal prosecutions, very few cases have caused as much financial harm as you have. »
Prosecutors had sought a 12-year prison sentence, saying Kwon’s lies to his clients contributed to the “crypto winter” of 2022 and the bankruptcy of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX. Kwon’s lawyers asked for no more than five years, arguing that his crimes were motivated not by greed but by a desire to support Terraform’s TerraUSD stablecoin. The judge called the request “completely unreasonable.”
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