The LUNA Victims: Lives Destroyed by a Death Spiral

In December 2025, before he sentenced Do Kwon, US District Judge Paul Engelmayer told a Manhattan courtroom that he had read every one of the 315 letters sent to him by people who had lost money in Terra. One writer had lost $500,000 and with it a retirement plan. Another, who had been earning 20% a year on $62,000, said the loss ended his marriage and sent him back to live with his parents. The judge read aloud from a letter by someone who had thought about suicide after persuading his father to put $100,000, the father's life savings, into the scheme.

Those letters are the most complete record that exists of what the collapse of Terra did to ordinary people. They arrived three and a half years after the event, and they describe something the price charts never showed.

What collapsed, and how fast

Terra was a blockchain network built by Terraform Labs, a Singapore company co-founded by Do Kwon, a South Korean graduate of Stanford. Its best-known product was TerraUSD, or UST, a stablecoin: a digital token meant to be worth exactly one dollar at all times, like a casino chip that can always be cashed in for a dollar. Most stablecoins do that by holding real dollars or Treasury bills in reserve. UST did not. It promised to hold its value through a swap with its sister token, LUNA. Anyone could trade one UST for one dollar's worth of newly created LUNA, and the bet was that traders chasing that swap would always pull UST back to a dollar.

The thing that drew savers in was Anchor Protocol, a Terra savings product that paid close to 20% a year on UST deposits, at a time when bank accounts paid almost nothing. To many investors it looked like a high-yield savings account with a dollar-pegged balance.

In the second week of May 2022, large withdrawals pushed UST below a dollar. Holders rushed to swap out, the swap printed billions of new LUNA tokens, and LUNA's price fell faster the more was printed. Within about a week LUNA went from around $80 to a fraction of a cent and UST was worth pennies. Roughly $40 billion in market value disappeared, the figure that now appears in every court document about the case. It was a bank run on a bank that had no vault.

The deaths that were reported

Within days, reports of deaths linked to the crash began to circulate. Not all of them survived scrutiny, and the record is worth stating carefully.

In Taichung, Taiwan, a 29-year-old man surnamed Wu died after falling from the high-rise tower where he lived on 24 May 2022. Taiwan News reported that police described it as an apparent suicide, found no note and no sign of a struggle, and that messages on his phone showed he had told relatives and friends his LUNA holdings had lost 99% of their value in two days. One message said he had put in $2 million and had about $1,000 left. Police said at the time that his finances and the cause of the fall were still under investigation, and no final finding was reported in English-language media.

In South Korea, the deaths of a family of three, Cho Yu-na, aged 10, and her parents, were reported around the world as a LUNA tragedy. Their car was recovered from the sea off Wando, South Jeolla province, on 29 June 2022. Korean media reported that the parents had searched online for "LUNA coin" in the weeks before they disappeared. The police investigation told a different story about the money. According to Newsis, police found the couple had put about 130 million won into more than ten cryptocurrencies over three months in 2021 and withdrawn most of it, losing about 20 million won, and had borrowed about 150 million won since 2020. Transaction records from five Korean exchanges showed no LUNA trades. Some later reports still described the 20 million won as a LUNA loss. On the evidence police made public, the family were in debt and had lost money on crypto, but this case cannot be counted as a LUNA death.

A third case that circulated online, of a man in China who killed his daughter and jumped into the sea with his wife, was reported by Chinese media in early 2021. It happened in Dalian in June 2020, two years before Terra failed, and the man told a court he had lost money on bitcoin. It has nothing to do with LUNA.

At Kwon's sentencing, Josh Golder, who said he had lost a mid-eight-figure sum, wrote that a friend who had also invested heavily jumped from a building in Miami after telling his girlfriend he had lost money in crypto. That account comes from his letter and has not been confirmed by authorities.

The forums

On Reddit, the r/terraluna forum became a running record of the collapse. By 11 May 2022, Fortune reported, the post pinned at the top of the page was a list of suicide prevention helplines from around the world. CNN described talk of suicide on the forum as rampant that week: one user said a friend who had put savings into LUNA had attempted suicide, and another who said he had lost more than $450,000 wrote about suicidal thoughts. The moderators later locked the forum to new posts, and members opened a new one called r/TerraLunaVictims.

On 13 May 2022, Kwon broke his silence on Twitter. He wrote that he was heartbroken about the pain his invention had brought on everyone, said he had been on the phone with community members who had been hurt, and said neither he nor any institution he was affiliated with had profited from the collapse. His proposal was a new chain, Terra 2.0, with fresh LUNA tokens airdropped to holders of the old ones. The old token lived on as LUNA Classic.

Courts and money, as of October 2026

Kwon left South Korea in April 2022, weeks before the collapse. Seoul prosecutors issued an arrest warrant that September. He was arrested in Montenegro in March 2023 while trying to board a flight with a forged passport, spent almost two years fighting rival extradition requests from the United States and South Korea, and was handed to the US on 31 December 2024. In August 2025 he pleaded guilty in Manhattan to conspiracy to defraud and wire fraud. On 11 December 2025 Engelmayer sentenced him to 15 years, more than the 12 prosecutors had asked for, calling their request unreasonably lenient. The investors, the judge said, were taking a risk, but not the risk of being a fraud victim. Kwon told the court the victims' stories were heartbreaking.

Under his plea deal he agreed to forfeit about $19 million, and US prosecutors agreed not to oppose a transfer to a South Korean prison after he has served half his sentence. Korean prosecutors have said he would face a separate trial there. They put the number of Korean victims at about 200,000 and their losses at about 300 billion won.

Victims have one route to some of their money back. Terraform, which filed for bankruptcy in the US in January 2024 and agreed a $4.47 billion settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission that June, runs a claims process for people who lost money on UST and LUNA. The claims portal, run by the advisory firm Kroll, closed on 30 April 2025, and the company estimated the pot at between $185 million and $442 million, a small fraction of what was lost. In December 2025 the administrator winding down Terraform, Todd Snyder, sued the trading firm Jump Trading for $4 billion, alleging it secretly profited from propping up UST. Jump called the suit a desperate attempt to shift blame and said it would fight it.

If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988 (US). Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741. International Association for Suicide Prevention: https://www.iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres/