Do Kwon will be absent from the SEC fraud trial due to extradition delays.

According to a report by Reuters on February 27, Do Kwon, co-founder of Terraform Labs, may miss the civil trial on fraud charges brought against him by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on March 25 due to delays in his extradition process in Montenegro. Kwon's lawyer, David Patton, stated in a letter submitted to the Manhattan federal court that Kwon will not seek to postpone the trial date regardless of when he is eventually extradited. Patton had made a similar commitment in January. Kwon and his company Terraform Labs were sued by the SEC in February last year over the collapse of the TerraUSD and Luna cryptocurrencies in May 2022, which allegedly caused losses of about $40 billion in the crypto market. The SEC accused Terraform and Kwon of deceiving investors about the stability of TerraUSD and how a popular South Korean mobile payment app used the Terraform blockchain to settle transactions. Kwon has denied all wrongdoing. He also faces related criminal charges in the United States and has been in custody since his arrest in Montenegro in March last year. Last week, a court in Podgorica, Montenegro's capital, ruled that Kwon should be extradited to the United States instead of his preferred destination of South Korea. Kwon is appealing the decision, and his local lawyer, Goran Rodic, said that due to "multiple unexpected errors" by lower courts in Montenegro, the extradition process is taking much longer than expected, and he does not expect Kwon to be extradited anywhere by the end of March. In December last year, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, who is overseeing the SEC case, said that Terraform and Kwon failed to register TerraUSD and Luna, violating U.S. law.