Do Kwon, "King Of The Lunatics", Becomes Bitcoin's Most-Watched Whale
This year, a group led by Do Kwon wowed the laser-eye crowd by buying more than $1.5 billion in Bitcoin.
Back in 2016, when Do Kwon was just a little-known startup founder with grand ambitions of bringing free internet to all, he noticed his research on distributed networks kept bringing up stuff on Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Next thing he knew, he'd fallen “down the crypto rabbit hole.”
Fast forward to today, and this relative newcomer is now one of the most influential — and controversial — figures in that rabbit hole.
On one side are the legions of fans and deep-pocketed crypto backers called “Lunatics,” who have turned Kwon's vision of engineering a stable, digital currency that's both easy to spend in real life and free from the tentacles of Wall Street and government regulators into one of the biggest blockchain projects to date — with tens of billions of dollars' worth of crypto tied to the ecosystem. (“Lunatics,” for the uninitiated, is a nod to the Luna token, which through some algorithmic wizardry, is designed to keep the Terra stablecoin, commonly referred to as UST, stable. More on that later.)
On the other are the critics, including within crypto itself, who say Kwon is doomed to fail. Some liken the seemingly too-good-to-be-true 20% interest on the Terra blockchain's lending-and-borrowing program to one big Ponzi scheme that will ultimately collapse under its own weight. Others warn — albeit without much evidence — that it risks bringing down the entire world of digital assets.
At the center of it all is Kwon, the 30-year-old “King of the Lunatics.” This year, a group led by Kwon wowed the laser-eye crowd by buying more than $1.5 billion in Bitcoin to help prop up Terra, with plans to purchase as much as $10 billion
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