4 Years After Terra’s Collapse, Hodlnaut’s Former CEO Faces Fraud Charges In Singapore Court

Zhu Juntao, co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer of the now-defunct Singapore-based crypto lending platform Hodlnaut, was charged in a Singapore courtroom on May 26, 2026 with fraud by false illustration — practically 4 years after the Terra/LUNA ecosystem implosion triggered a $193 million monetary shortfall that finally ended the platform and stranded greater than 30,000 customers worldwide.

The costs have been announced by the Commercial Affairs Department of the Singapore Police Force, which has been investigating Hodlnaut and its administrators since November 2022. Zhu, 36, faces six counts in complete — three beneath Section 424A(1)(a) learn with Section 424A(3) of Singapore’s Penal Code 1871, and three beneath the identical provision learn along with Section 109 of the identical code, which covers abetment. If convicted on every cost, he faces imprisonment of as much as 20 years, a superb, or each, per the police assertion.

What The Charges Allege

The fraud costs middle on a selected window: May to July 2022, the weeks instantly following TerraUSD’s catastrophic de-pegging in early May of that 12 months. According to the Singapore Police Force’s official assertion, Zhu allegedly directed Hodlnaut staff to make deceptive statements on the corporate’s official Telegram group and in emails despatched on to customers — assertions that Hodlnaut had no direct publicity to UST and had not suffered losses from the collapse.

The statements, as documented in (*4*) SG’s reporting of courtroom filings, included a publish wherein Hodlnaut wrote that it had “not taken any losses as a agency” and that solely customers who personally held UST have been affected. Zhu additionally allegedly directed a separate worker to e mail 30 recipients stating the corporate had assumed no losses. Those statements, prosecutors now allege, have been false and meant to deceive customers throughout essentially the most essential interval of the platform’s deterioration.

What Actually Happened With Terra

The judicial document that emerged after Hodlnaut suspended withdrawals in August 2022 informed a starkly totally different story. An interim judicial managers’ report seen by Bloomberg discovered that Hodlnaut had misplaced practically $190 million via its publicity to the collapsed Terra ecosystem — a determine the platform had actively downplayed to customers whereas the losses gathered. On-chain analytics companies subsequently confirmed materials publicity to UST and TerraKind Labs-linked exercise that Hodlnaut had not beforehand acknowledged.

Court paperwork filed in Singapore in August 2022, when the platform sought creditor safety, disclosed a $193 million monetary shortfall. Court-appointed managers later confirmed an extra $13.1 million in person property have been stranded on the collapsed FTX change.

Hodlnaut was subsequently ordered to liquidate by Singapore’s High Court, with EY companions appointed as joint liquidators. Zhu indicated he was not responsible and disputed all costs at his May 26 listening to — a pre-trial convention has been scheduled for June 2026, per Channel News Asia.

This growth marks a major second for the nascent sector’s long-running accountability reckoning following the 2022 crypto contagion. The Terra collapse set off a series of platform failures — Celsius, Voyager, Three Arrows Capital, and ultimately FTX amongst them — that collectively price retail customers a whole bunch of billions of {dollars}.

That 4 years have elapsed between Hodlnaut’s collapse and its former CEO’s first day in courtroom is itself a mirrored image of how slowly the authorized system processes crypto’s most consequential failures — and a reminder that the circumstances are removed from closed.

Cover picture from Grok, ETHUSD chart from Tradingview