Singapore authorities have charged former CEO of cryptocurrency lender Hodlnaut Zhu Juntao with fraud, nearly four years after the company froze withdrawals during the collapse of the TerraUSD ecosystem.
Singapore Police said Zhu faces six counts of fraud by false representation in an announcement on Tuesday. Prosecutors allege that Zhu directed employees in 2022 to post false statements on Hodlnaut’s Telegram channels and in customer emails alleging that the company had no direct exposure to the TerraUSD collapse and had suffered no losses as a result.
Authorities also alleged that Zhu repeated similar claims on his personal account
Zhu contested all six charges in court and was given a pretrial conference date of June 2026, according to local media reports.
Hodlnaut was one of several cryptocurrency lenders that failed after the implosion of the Terraform Labs algorithmic stablecoin ecosystem in May 2022. The collapse wiped around $40 billion from the cryptocurrency market and contributed to bankruptcies at companies such as Three Arrows Capital, Celsius, and Voyager.
Reports filed during Hodlnaut’s restructuring proceedings indicated that the company had funneled approximately $317 million of user funds into Terra’s Anchor Protocol, which offered around 19.5% in annualized returns on UST deposits before the collapse, which caused UST to nearly become worthless.
Court-appointed receivers later estimated that Hodlnaut lost about $189.7 million from exposure to Terra’s collapse. Reports reviewed during restructuring proceedings said the company had poor internal record-keeping and that some executives did not fully cooperate with investigators.
Singapore-based Hodlnaut, founded in 2019, offered clients performing crypto accounts and served over 30,000 users worldwide before suspending withdrawals in August 2022.
The company was subsequently placed under judicial management and the Singapore High Court ordered its liquidation.
