In brief
- The DOJ wants Do Kwon to receive the full 12-year prison sentence allowed under the plea deal he signed in August.
- Prosecutors say a lighter sentence would be unfair compared to Sam Bankman-Fried’s 25-year prison sentence.
- Kwon will be sentenced December 11 for two crimes: conspiracy to defraud and wire fraud.
The Department of Justice is asking a federal judge to sentence Do Kwon to 12 years in prison—the maximum sentence prosecutors reserved the right to pursue after the Terra founder pleaded guilty this summer.
Though Kwon is technically eligible to serve 25 years in federal prison, the DOJ promised in August that it would only seek up to 12 years as part of a deal reached to encourage Kwon to forgo a jury trial and admit to two crimes: conspiracy to defraud, and wire fraud.
Now, federal prosecutors are advocating that the disgraced crypto founder receive the maximum sentence under that deal. In a legal filing submitted late Thursday, DOJ lawyers argued that Kwon needs a stiff sentence to avoid “unwarranted sentencing disparities” with other, similar cases—namely, that of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
In a 2023 jury trial, Bankman-Fried was found guilty of seven fraud and conspiracy charges for his role in his $32 billion crypto exchange’s implosion. A judge later sentenced him to 25 years in prison.
“Judge Kaplan imposed a sentence of 25 years on Bankman-Fried who, like Kwon, perpetrated a fraud of staggering proportions in his twenties and then attributed his brazen criminal conduct in part to youth and inexperience,” the prosecutors wrote.
Kwon, a 34-year old Korean national, found himself at the center of a global financial meltdown in 2022 when two cryptocurrencies he created, UST and LUNA, rapidly became worthless, wiping out over $40 billion in value and triggering a cascading crisis in the crypto market. The resulting “contagion” impacted FTX and several other notable firms.
In Thursday’s filing, prosecutors noted that Kwon’s attorneys failed to mention Bankman-Fried’s case in their request that the entrepreneur receive a five-year prison sentence.
“True, Bankman-Fried exercised his right to a trial,” the DOJ said. “But that scarcely justifies a 20-year delta between Bankman-Fried’s sentence and that requested by Kwon.”
The DOJ also took aim at Kwon’s attorneys for arguing the Terra founder should receive a “far shorter sentence” than Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky, who was handed 12 years earlier in 2025 for misappropriating his customers’ crypto and manipulating the price of his firm’s token.
“While Mashinsky was not detained pending trial and contested core aspects of his conduct, neither did he obtain a fake passport and try to live on the lam in a foreign country,” prosecutors said. “In any event, the magnitude of Mashinsky’s crime pales in comparison to Kwon’s: $5 billion versus $40 billion in investor losses.”
Kwon was arrested in Montenegro in 2023 and convicted of traveling with forged passports months after warrants were issued for his arrest in both the United States and South Korea.
After an extremely protracted jurisdictional battle, the crypto entrepreneur was extradited to New York earlier this year.
Kwon will be sentenced in Manhattan on December 11 by U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer.
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