Singapore authorities have charged crypto lender Hodlnaut’s former CEO Zhu Juntao with fraud, almost four years after the company froze withdrawals during the collapse of the TerraUSD ecosystem.
Singapore police said on Tuesday that Zhu faces six charges of fraud by false representation. Prosecutors allege that Zhu directed employees in 2022 to post false statements on Hodlnaut’s Telegram channels and in customer emails, claiming the company was not directly exposed to TerraUSD’s collapse and did not suffer losses as a result.
Authorities also claimed that Zhu repeated similar claims on his personal account X, then known as Twitter, in three posts in June 2022. If convicted, Zhu could face up to 20 years in prison, fines or both for each charge under Singapore law.
Zhu contested all six charges in court and was granted a pretrial conference date in June 2026, according to local media.
Hodlnaut was one of several crypto lenders that went bankrupt after the implosion of Terraform Labs’ algorithmic stablecoin ecosystem in May 2022. The collapse wiped about $40 billion from the crypto market and contributed to the bankruptcy of companies including Three Arrows Capital, Celsius, and Voyager.
Reports filed during Hodlnaut’s restructuring proceedings indicated that the company funneled approximately $317 million in user funds into Terra’s Anchor protocol, which offered an annualized return of approximately 19.5% on UST deposits before the collapse, which saw UST become almost worthless.
Court-appointed legal officials later estimated that Hodlnaut lost about $189.7 million as a result of Terra’s collapse. Reports reviewed during the restructuring proceedings indicated that the company had poor internal record-keeping and that some executives did not fully cooperate with investigators.
Singapore-based Hodlnaut, founded in 2019, offered its customers productive crypto accounts and served over 30,000 users worldwide before stopping withdrawals in August 2022.
The company subsequently entered into judicial management and was placed into liquidation by the High Court of Singapore.
