(Kitco News) - Do Kwon, founder of the decentralized finance protocol Terra, recently sat down for one of his first interviews since the collapse of the protocol and its TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin, a $45 billion implosion that sent shockwaves across the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
In his discussion with Zack Guzman from Coinage, the CEO of Terraform Labs admitted that the success of the project led to him having a high degree of confidence and that he "literally didn't think about even for one second" what would happen if Terra collapsed.
Looking back, Kwon admits that his overconfidence in the project as it was inching close to $100 billion "seems super irrational" now and suggested that he also "never thought about what could happen to me if this fails."
In defense of the project and his own efforts, Kwon reiterated the fact that Terra was not a Ponzi scheme, noting that some of its earliest investors were among those who were hardest hit by its collapse.
Kwon also took full responsibility for the possibility that there was a mole inside Terra that took advantage of the situation by short-selling the project.
"But if those opportunities existed, then the blame is on the person that presented those vulnerabilities in the first place… I, and I alone, am responsible for any weaknesses that could have been presented for a short seller to start to take profit," he said.
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As a result of Terra's spectacular collapse and the ensuing fallout, Kwon now finds himself at the center of a fraud investigation by South Korean officials. Terra developers and former developers have been barred from leaving the country and Kwon is also the subject of multiple lawsuits in both the US and South Korea.
The Terra founder currently resides in Singapore, where he moved out of fear for the safety of his wife and child after receiving threats while living in South Korea. In response to how he plans on dealing with the allegations against him, Kwon suggested that dealing with the due process was not a question of what you are prepared to face but how you are going to face it.
"What we're going to do is we're just going to put out the facts as we know them. We're going to be totally honest and deal with whatever consequences as they may be," Kwon stated in the interview.
As for comparisons between Terraform labs and the infamous blood testing start-up Theranos, Kwon pushed back against any such parallels with Elizabeth Holmes' now defunct blood-testing start-up by suggesting that the analogy was inappropriate because the blood testing technology never worked.
"For Terra stablecoins, it was working beautifully throughout the entire history that it was, and the fact that it was working perfectly was visible in the order books and was present in all the integrations in the open source and transparent matter [of] crypto until it stopped working," Kwon said in defense of the Terra platform.
