Three months ago, Do Kwon was a multi-billionaire on paper. He had a million followers on Twitter. And he commanded a sprawling crypto empire nearing $100 billion in value, which had seemed to explode from obscurity to ubiquity overnight.

If there were a Mt. Rushmore of crypto, Kwon’s face would have been half-chiseled into stone by May of this year. And one of those faces would have been an anonymous slab in a hoodie, so that’s saying something. His algorithmic stablecoin “UST,” created by his company Terraform Labs (TFL), had crypto’s most coveted investors lining up to give him their money.

The Terra ecosystem’s astronomical growth was unprecedented. If it survived the crucible of early adoption, it was poised to become the backbone of the entire decentralized economy — “crypto’s reserve currency,” as the pitch tended to go. UST would do this by performing one deceptively simple job: always be worth one dollar, and in doing so, give crypto a less volatile medium of exchange than standard bearers like bitcoin.

To keep UST’s price steady, Kwon designed a companion coin, LUNA, which he programmed to have a balancing effect on UST’s price. If demand for UST went up or down, then Kwon’s algorithm would adjust the supply of LUNA accordingly, until market forces drove UST back to $1. Zoom all the way out, and if UST maintained that dollar peg long enough, then Kwon would become the man at the center of the coin at the center of a multi-trillion dollar industry.