“Terra Was My Life”: Do Kwon’s New Interview is a Shameless PR Stunt

Do Kwon has finally broken his silence. With countless unanswered questions and a global manhunt on his tail, the LUNA founder has evaded the spotlight. Until now. In an interview with brand-new crypto media company Coinage, Do Kwon has resurfaced to face the wrath of the public… Or so we had hoped.

When Coinage released their teaser trailer for a near-30min video interview, suspicion was already aroused. Accusing the interviewer of “bias” and “shilling”, famed crypto personality FatManTerra questioned why Do Kwon had picked Coinage as its choice of media outlet.

“Do, why not have an interview with someone more neutral and respectable like Bloomberg or Fortune instead of someone who has been consistently shilling you for years, almost as if he’s paid? And will you address the billions you cashed out of the system?” FatManTerra wrote on Twitter in response to the interview teaser.

Read more: Do Kwon Breaks Silence But Interviewer Accused of Shilling

Now the full video has been released, it’s further evident that the interview is nothing more than a PR stunt.

The first 10 minutes of the video’s 29:46 minutes feature Coinage founder Zack Guzmán talking to the camera, leaving around 19 minutes of actual interview time with Do Kwon – hardly much time for what was billed as an investigatory piece that entailed two days of interviews.

In his 10-minute-long opening monologue, Guzmán reveals that Terraform Labs was an investor in the show’s parent company, making it clear why Coinage was Do Kwon’s first port of call.

When viewers are finally exposed to Do Kwon, it becomes quickly apparent that the questions are overly sympathetic towards the founder.

“What do you point to as kind of the easiest defense of it’s not fraud?” is Guzmán’s first question, allowing Do Kwon the opportunity to absolve himself from allegations of fraud.

“I don’t think it’s like a morality issue, but it’s like coming in from like a loss of this magnitude and especially touching upon an industry that requires a lot of technical background knowledge to be able to understand, It’s just like very hard to process all of that and then come to a balanced conclusion when there’s so much pain and anger in the air,” Do Kwon responds, not entirely answering the question.

Instead of pressing Do Kwon on fraud allegations, Guzmán’s line of questioning swiftly turns to Do Kwon’s emotions.

“To see it all play out in 72 hours – Were you even surprised at like how quickly it unravelled?”, “What do you say is the thing to say ‘you can trust me?'” and “As far as a creator [how was it?],” are some of the rudimentary questions posed by Guzmán.

Read more: Do Kwon Denies Siphoning US$2.7 Billion Before LUNA Crash

Do Kwon’s responses focused more on his personal experience rather than accountability. “I just didn’t think this would happen… I just haven’t found the words to describe what that feels like… I’m sure that a lot of people in the community that lost their money, life savings and different projects that were building on top of Terra probably went through similar and it’s quite possibly worse experiences…. It’s brutal.”

“I think if you were in this for personal benefit, that is probably the dumbest way to try to get that personal benefit as possible,” Do Kwon says regarding trust.

Admitting to wrongdoing stems from “healing” for Do Kwon too, rather than for the sake of accountability.

“And I think in terms of healing wounds, the best that I can do is to just be upfront with everything that happened, you know, just admit that I was wrong,” he says.

“I think on some other level I believed too strongly in Bitcoin. I honestly didn’t think it would fall this much and I know that from time to time in its history, Bitcoin has gone down 80% every now and then. But my thinking back then was like the amount of economic output that’s been built in crypto, the amount of people that have come in and started to build in this industry is unparalleled compared to all the other points in time. I felt like it was starting to display resilience as a decentralized, pristine type of commodity. But I was wrong.”

Guzmán then asks Do Kwon to walk us through the timeline of events on the fateful day that LUNA crashed to zero.

“So I was in Singapore. I wake up in the morning and then I think the Curve pool was imbalanced because somebody had done like a very large trade. So I think the initial trade was like $84 million. And then collectively it had built up to like a few hundred million. But then like the sentiment on Twitter started to get worse, and then there started to be more people that were trading against the Curve pools. So the amount of cell pressure that we were seeing, you know, started to get worse and worse. So we started to put together a $2 billion round like in the middle of the night. And then the news leaked. You know, once the news leaked, we started to see massive shorts pile up against LUNA. So the value of the tokens that we were ready to sell just basically got decimated.”

Read more: Did Do Kwon’s Arrogance Cause Terra’s Downfall?

Wishing to elaborate more, Guzmán continues to ask Do Kwon to open up more about “the situation in the war room at that point.”

“When I was trying to do the round, it wasn’t so much that I thought the peg would be irrecoverable. So like you’ve got to understand that I’ve been through multiple of these crises before and then the peg always recovered. I went into, like, a mini state of shock, I think, I didn’t notice but I think people started to like, get up and get some sleep because for the past few days, like most people in those places, just hadn’t been sleeping at all.”

A sympathetic Guzmán asks, “How much sleep did you get during that whole week?”

“Like eight days. I don’t think I slept at all,” Do Kwon responded.

“You pulled eight straight all nighters?!” an astounded Guzmán asks.

“So seven nights and then I think had one burrito throughout the entire time,” Do Kwon clarifies.

“A burrito?!” Guzmán exclaims in disbelief.

“One burrito. Half a burrito.” Do Kwon reiterates.

“Oh, my God,” a chummy Guzmán responds.

The rest of the interview is an asserted effort to inject personality and relatability to the crypto villain. “How is the experience that unfolded with Terraform changed Do Kwon?” Guzmán asks at one point.

“I think the the biggest learning is like, I have a lot of clarity in the things that I enjoy doing. So I like this moment where you sort of have an idea of what you think the future should look like,” Do Kwon says.

“I just want to make it perfectly clear, the way that I thought about Terra and LUNA was I mean, this was essentially my life.”

If the most pressing question is how many hours he slept and the amount of burritos he consumed, it’s clear that Coinage wasn’t asking the right questions. Instead of asking about the future of LUNA 2.0, $LUNC and the stability of stablecoins, the interview served as a publicity stunt to de-villainize Do Kwon.

Then again, what can you expect from a media company backed by Terraform Labs?