EXCLUSIVE: Landing Terra founder Do Kwon's first interview since his $45 billion collapse

It took just 72 hours for $45 billion to be erased from his project's market cap in what was crypto's largest-ever collapse. He went from crypto's hottest founder to pariah just as quickly.

And yet, as I sit accross from Do Kwon, the co-founder of Terra, it still feels like he's on top of the world. That's because we kind of are.

In the sprawling Singapore high-rise office of his now hobbled company, I sat down with Kwon for his first interview since Terra's collapse to finally address what really happened in that May meltdown that rocked the entire crypto space.

The trailer to that interview, which took place over two days, is now live for Coinage, the community-owned show I helped create. (Holders of Coinage's free Subscriber NFT saw that trailer first and will be first to watch the interview when it debuts Monday.)

Do Kwon breaks his silence three months after his project imploded in an exclusive interview with the community-owned crypto show Coinage. (Source: Coinage.media)

When I get to Singapore, I first ask Do just how many reporters hit him up for this interview. "Basically, everyone reached out," he tells me, before listing the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and even a couple Netflix documentarians.

And yet, here I was. With a rag-tag crew about to hop into the home of the man who launched a crypto project that went from obscurity to a top-10 ecosystem by market cap in just a couple years before its infamous implosion that left Kwon, in his words, "the most hated man on the internet."

In full transparency, I had chased this interview for the entirety of the three months that passed since Terra collapsed in May. I emailed to check in almost every day. It's likely fair to say I had more questions than anyone else. As far as journalistic disclosures go, I had much more on the line than just the money I had invested in Terra and lost. Kwon's Terraform Labs was also an investor in the the media company I had launched this year. I watched in May as my personal investment became worthless, and the reputation of one our investors basically followed suit.

Do Kwon breaks his silence three months after his project imploded in an exclusive interview with the community-owned crypto show Coinage. (Source: Coinage.media)

But my pitch to get Kwon to share his story with me was always simple. As I watched reporters scramble to figure out how to characterize what was happening as Terra's stablecoin began to break from its intended $1 peg, it became clear to me how few others were prepared to understand the digital bank run as it happened in real-time. Of course, you can't blame them. Terra's design was always incredibly complex, and I'd never fault any reporter who was thrown into covering that without warning nor the context I had as a Terra user, and having interviewed Do Kwon multiple times in 2021 at Yahoo Finance.

As soon as he agreed to the interview, my producer and I booked the first flights out of Singapore we could get.

I made only one promise to Do Kwon, and he made only two requests of me. My sole promise was that I would be able to deliver the context of how the Terra project worked, correctly. After all, Coinage's mission is literally to be the first mainstream crypto show that's governed by a community of smart people. Do Kwon's requests, however, had nothing to do with him. He only asked we don't show the faces of his employees or where his team's office was located, because the number of death threats people had been receiving were alarming. It's fitting at this point to remember this whole thing impacted far more people than just Do Kwon.

As I prepared for the interview, those stakes become increasingly clear. Between our two days of filming, news breaks that Korean prosecutors had raided the home of his co-founder Daniel Shin. Our second day of shooting takes a turn when we focus on everything and everyone else his failure has impacted.

"Whenever you ask questions about me feeling bad, the default answer is always going to be that I feel terrible, obviously," Kwon tells me. But that likely offers little solace to those who lost everything in Terra's collapse. When pressed, the man at the center of the project that had delivered on such incredible promise — right up until it didn't — took complete blame for its failure. In the end, not protecting Terra from any moves to pressure it to de-peg was a lack of oversight from him alone, Kwon told me.

"The blame is on the person that presented those vulnerabilities in the first place,” he said. “I, and I alone, am responsible for any weaknesses that could have been presented for a short seller to start to take profit.”

You can watch the debut Coinage episode: "Down Infinite: Inside Terra's Collapse" Monday August 15 at Coinage.Media.

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