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Do Kwon will have his day in Montenegrin court — and potentially Montenegrin jail — before any international extradition process begins, according to Mark Kovac, the country’s justice minister. 

The Terraform Labs founder was arrested in Montenegro last week after months of speculation about his whereabouts. Kwon was detained while trying to board a private jet with travel documents believed to be forgeries, according to local authorities. The initial detention has been extended to 30 days from 72 hours.

The U.S. and South Korea have both requested to extradite Kwon, Kovac told reporters at a press conference today. Local criminal proceedings take “primacy” over these extradition requests, he added. Both countries also requested the laptops and devices Kwon had with him at the time of his detention. 

When there are several extradition requests in place, the process for deciding which takes precedent is based on several factors, the minister said. These include the severity of the offense and when the request was received.

Running for cover

Social media has been rife with speculation over Kwon’s whereabouts since the spectacular collapse of the TerraUSD stablecoin in May and South Korean prosecutors decision bring charges in September.

Singaporean police confirmed Kwon was not in the city-state shortly after the Korean courts issued an arrest warrant for him.

Kwon branded the charges from South Korea as “politically motivated” and insisted he wasn’t on the run at the time. “The easier that I make it for people to figure out my location, the harder it is for me to continue regular life,” he told journalist Laura Shin in October. 

The beleaguered crypto entrepreneur was suspected of being in the Balkans since late last year, according to reports. It was reported in February that South Korean prosecutors had traveled to Serbia in search of Kwon.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

If the court rules that XRP is a security, it would mean the same for other alternative cryptocurrencies (altcoins) and subject them to stringent supervision. The market, however, expects Ripple to win after CFTC on Monday classified bitcoin as commodity.

The startup offers an order book protocol for decentralized finance (DeFi) in the Aptos ecosystem.

Decentralized autonomous organization Hydra Ventures is shaking up the world of fund-of-funds investing with a new model for the crypto industry.

Hydra Ventures DAO is the brainchild of pseudonymous venture investor P3terpan, a partner at venture firm 1kx. The decentralized organization has raised $10 million from investors to build a DAO that will back other investment DAOs. Investors in Hydra Ventures include 1kx, Collab+Currency, ConsenSys and Seed Club, the release said.

Wait, how many investment DAOs exist ?!

DAOs, collective organizations with no central authority that use blockchain technology for governance, are still relatively nascent. Data on DeepDAO show over 40 already exist.

P3terpan helped pioneer one of the first investment DAOs, MetaCartel Ventures, which has 75 members and deployed over $13 million into more than 70 projects, including Gitcoin and Gnosis Safe. He initially viewed the fast deployment pace of investment DAOs as “more of a bug than a feature.” Now he sees it as an advantage.

“As time went on, we realized that investment DAOs are really amazing vehicles for indexing exposure across a certain ecosystem or market focus,” he said.

Hydra Ventures will invest in between 30 to 40 DAOs — with a goal of investing up to 10% into the investment DAO itself. It’s already made one investment so far, which is yet to be announced, and it plans to incubate a handful of investment DAOs as part of the process, P3terpan said.

Administrative nightmare

Its core team includes members from 1kx, MetaCartel Ventures and Thing3, who bring existing investment DAO knowledge from building out MetaCartel Ventures.

For example, P3terpan expected member coordination to be one of the biggest challenges with MetaCartel Ventures but instead found tax, accounting and legal to be the real nightmare, he said. Hydra Ventures will integrate Thing3, an operations-focused service DAO, to solve this problem.

“The core team of Hydra Ventures DAO is a well-connected, ambitious group with a proven track record of identifying and investing in projects that become foundations for everyday users,” said Stephen McKeon, managing partner at Collab+Currency, in the release. “The venture DAO space is nascent and constantly evolving — so, to us, Hydra is well positioned to pioneer the DAO fund of funds model.”

Operator-led fund of funds

The DAOs that will likely secure backing from Hydra will be those with a substantial investment thesis, P3terpan said.

“People who are really passionate about a certain market domain or space really do have an advantage in investing in deal flow and due diligence and access than most venture funds if they are people on the ground,” P3terpan said. “And I think that’s a core thesis for Hydra.”

P3terpan started raising for the DAO in June last year and closed the raise in January. The funds will be stored in a diversified set of stablecoins with plans to deploy the funds over three years instead of in perpetuity, like MetaCartel Ventures. 

“I think the cool thing about Hydra is that for the first time ever we have builders operating a fund of funds,” P3terpan said. “Just ironic because most people who operate fund of funds come from an institutional capital background and I think this is the first science experiment where we see very active direct ecosystem participants operate fund of funds in a very crypto native way.”

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Web3 investors such as 1kx, ConsenSys, Collab+Currency, Wicklow Capital and Seed Club were among firms joining the investment round.

The public testnet will help developers improve the resilience, performance, and security of ShimmerEVM.

Exchange giant Binance hid its links to China, despite claims it had removed its business from the country in late 2017, according to a Financial Times report which cites internal company documents.

China banned crypto exchanges in 2017. Top executives, including CEO Changpeng Zhao, were among those who instructed employees to hide its presence in the country, the report said, adding that the company used a Chinese bank to pay some employees’ salaries as well as an office which was in use until the end of 2019.

“It is unfortunate that anonymous sources are citing ancient history (in crypto terms) and dramatically mischaracterizing events. This is not an accurate picture of Binance’s operations,” a Binance spokesperson said in an emailed statement to the FT, adding that the exchange does not operate in China or have any of its servers based in the country. 

“To be clear, the Chinese government, like any other government, has no access to Binance data except where we are responding to lawful and legitimate law enforcement requests,” they continued. The spokesperson added that the company has a customer service call center based in China to service global Mandarin speakers.

The report comes as question marks have been raised by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission over the company’s business operations. On Monday, it was revealed that the regulator is suing the exchange for unregistered trading activity in the U.S., among other allegations. 

Since the announcement, Binance has seen $2.2 billion of cryptocurrency flow out of the exchange over a period of around 45 hours, according to data collected by The Block Research. Part of this was caused by an initial flurry of small withdrawals in the first hour following the news. During the same time period, $1.3 billion of cryptocurrency was sent to the exchange — meaning a net outflow of $900 million.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The latest price moves in bitcoin (BTC) and crypto markets in context for March 29, 2023. First Mover is CoinDesk’s daily newsletter that contextualizes the latest actions in the crypto markets.

The Royal Mint in 2022 had been tasked by the government with creating a project in what was then the red-hot space.