Many will point to the collapse of the Terra ecosystem in May 2022 as the trigger for the last crypto crash/winter which eventually culminated with the collapse of FTX. And moments ago, a judge added a prison sentence for the mastermind behind it all. 

Terraform Labs co-founder and onetime fugitive Do Kwon, who in August pled guilty over one of the largest frauds in crypto history, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for the fraud that led to the company’s $40 billion collapse in 2022 and triggered a series of cascading crises in the cryptocurrency world, Bloomberg reported.

Kwon, 34, was sentenced at a hearing Thursday in New York by US District Judge Paul Engelmayer, capping US efforts to prosecute the crypto entrepreneur after a legal fight to extradite him from Montenegro, where he was imprisoned for using a fake passport.

He still faces fraud charges in his native South Korea.

“This was a fraud on an epic generational scale,” Engelmayer told Kwon. “In the history of federal prosecutions very few cases have caused more monetary harm than you did.”

Prosecutors had sought a 12-year sentence, saying Kwon’s lies to customers contributed to the “crypto winter” of 2022 and the failure of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX (who is also in prison for a similar massive fraud).

Kwon’s lawyers asked for no more than five years, arguing his crimes were motivated not by greed but a desire to prop up Terraform’s TerraUSD stablecoin. The judge called that request “wildly unreasonable.”

Kwon's prison term comes at a time when the Trump admin has weakened enforcement in crypto markets. On Oct. 23, Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who was convicted of failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program at the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.