Crypto Prophet Gets 15 Year Prison Sentence For Igniting $40B Crypto Collapse…

I’ll take “Crypto Pardons” for $500 please… 

Do “Hit the Quan” Kwon,  the once–boy genius of crypto Twitter, Stanford grad, and spiritual leader of the “trust the algorithm” crowd… has been sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for lighting roughly $40 billion on fire and then acting confused when people noticed. The judge didn’t mince words, calling it a “fraud of epic, generational scale,” which is about as close as the Southern District of New York gets to saying “absolutely cooked.”

(Source: Giphy) 

Quick refresher for those of you who aren’t crypto mouth breathers: Kwon was the guy behind TerraUSD and Luna, the “stable” coin combo that very much did not stay stable. The initial idea for these projects was that TerraUSD stays pegged to a dollar, Luna backs it up, math does the rest. Except when Terra slipped below $1 in 2021, the math didn’t fix it. So Kwon allegedly had a high-frequency trading firm quietly prop the thing up, told investors the algorithm saved the day, and let the hype rip. Luna ballooned to $50B. Everyone felt rich. For like… a minute.

(Source: CNBC) 

Then 2022 showed up with a chair and a folding table. The whole thing collapsed, helped trigger the broader crypto winter, and set off a chain reaction that eventually took FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried down with it. Retail got obliterated. Retirement accounts vaporized. College funds disappeared. According to the judge, reading victim letters felt like “cult followers” still processing what happened. Which, honestly, tracks.

Kwon stood there in prison yellows, apologized, said he never meant for this to happen, and admitted the industry standards were bad… which is a wild sentence considering he was the industry standard for a while. His lawyers asked for five years while the judge laughed and gave him fifteen years instead, saying twelve (what prosecutors wanted) was already being generous. He also tacked on forfeitures and noted that some people still believe in him, which might be the most crypto sentence of all time. Of course, this whole debacle wasn’t a freak accident. It was purely leverage and a poor rendition of “trust me bro” economics. Kwon obviously didn’t invent that in the crypto world… but he did take it to a logical conclusion. Meaning the only difference between him and half the people who ran tokens in 2021 is mostly timing and luck.

(Source: Giphy) 

So yeah… Kwon, one of the loudest crypto prophets alive, is getting canned. And while accountability season finally showed up for a hot second… I can only imagine Barron is just waiting for the sharpie ink to dry on the pardon LOL. Until next time, friends… 

At the time of publishing, Stocks.News does not hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.