Zhu Juntao, co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer of the now-defunct Singapore-based crypto lending platform Hodlnaut, was charged in a Singapore court on May 26, 2026 with fraud by false representation — nearly four years after the Terra/LUNA ecosystem implosion triggered a $193 million financial shortfall that ultimately ended the platform and stranded more than 30,000 users worldwide.
The charges were announced by the Commercial Affairs Department of the Singapore Police Force, which has been investigating Hodlnaut and its directors since November 2022. Zhu, 36, faces six counts in total — three under Section 424A(1)(a) read with Section 424A(3) of Singapore’s Penal Code 1871, and three under the same provision read together with Section 109 of the same code, which covers abetment. If convicted on each charge, he faces imprisonment of up to 20 years, a fine, or both, per the police statement.
What The Charges Allege
The fraud charges center on a specific window: May to July 2022, the weeks immediately following TerraUSD’s catastrophic de-pegging in early May of that year. According to the Singapore Police Force’s official statement, Zhu allegedly directed Hodlnaut employees to make misleading statements on the company’s official Telegram group and in emails sent directly to users — assertions that Hodlnaut had no direct exposure to UST and had not suffered losses from the collapse.
The statements, as documented in Mothership SG’s reporting of court filings, included a post in which Hodlnaut wrote that it had “not taken any losses as a firm” and that only users who personally held UST were affected. Zhu also allegedly directed a separate employee to email 30 recipients stating the company had assumed no losses. Those statements, prosecutors now allege, were false and intended to deceive users during the most critical period of the platform’s deterioration.
What Actually Happened With Terra
The judicial record that emerged after Hodlnaut suspended withdrawals in August 2022 told a starkly different story. An interim judicial managers’ report seen by Bloomberg found that Hodlnaut had lost nearly $190 million through its exposure to the collapsed Terra ecosystem — a figure the platform had actively downplayed to users while the losses accumulated. On-chain analytics firms subsequently confirmed material exposure to UST and TerraForm Labs-linked activity that Hodlnaut had not previously acknowledged.
Court documents filed in Singapore in August 2022, when the platform sought creditor protection, disclosed a $193 million financial shortfall. Court-appointed managers later confirmed an additional $13.1 million in user assets were stranded on the collapsed FTX exchange.
Hodlnaut was subsequently ordered to liquidate by Singapore’s High Court, with EY partners appointed as joint liquidators. Zhu indicated he was not guilty and disputed all charges at his May 26 hearing — a pre-trial conference has been scheduled for June 2026, per Channel News Asia.
This development marks a significant moment for the nascent sector’s long-running accountability reckoning following the 2022 crypto contagion. The Terra collapse set off a chain of platform failures — Celsius, Voyager, Three Arrows Capital, and eventually FTX among them — that collectively cost retail users hundreds of billions of dollars.
That four years have elapsed between Hodlnaut’s collapse and its former CEO’s first day in court is itself a reflection of how slowly the legal system processes crypto’s most consequential failures — and a reminder that the cases are far from closed.
Cover image from Grok, ETHUSD chart from Tradingview
