The Singapore Police Force’s (SPF) Commercial Affairs Department announced on Tuesday morning, May 26, 2026, that Zhu Juntao, Co-Founder and former CEO of the now-defunct crypto platform Hodlnaut, has been formally charged with fraud by false representation. This marks the first major criminal indictment leveled against a senior Hodlnaut executive since the lending platform’s spectacular multi-million-dollar collapse in August 2022.
According to official police filings, the criminal case targets what Hodlnaut corporate leadership told its global user base during the most volatile weeks of the Terra/LUNA ecosystem meltdown. The SPF statement notes: “Following a sudden price crash of TerraUSD (‘UST’) in early May 2022, Zhu allegedly instigated Hodlnaut’s employees to make misleading statements on the company’s official Telegram group chat and in official emails sent directly to some of its users between May and July 2022. These statements allegedly asserted that Hodlnaut did not have direct exposure to UST and/or did not suffer losses arising from the crash of UST.”
In effect, while the algorithmic stablecoin was unravelling and Hodlnaut’s operational balance sheet was becoming critically impaired, customers seeking emergency assurances were systematically told that corporate assets were completely insulated. These communications were maintained for over two months until the platform abruptly froze all user withdrawals on August 8, 2022.
The Distance Between the Statements and the Reality
The gap between what Hodlnaut was telling users and what was actually on its books appears to have been substantial.
Hodlnaut later disclosed a $193 million financial shortfall in court documents filed in Singapore in August 2022, when the platform sought protection from creditors. On-chain analytics firms identified material exposure to UST and to TerraForm Labs–linked activity that Hodlnaut had not previously acknowledged. And in November 2022, court-appointed interim judicial managers confirmed that approximately $13.1 million of Hodlnaut’s user assets were stranded on the collapsed FTX exchange, where the platform had held a substantial portion of its centralized-exchange-held tokens.
That broader picture had been the subject of CAD’s investigation since November 2022, when Singapore police first announced they were probing Hodlnaut and its directors for possible cheating and fraud offenses under Sections 417 and 424A of Singapore’s Penal Code. Tuesday’s charge against Zhu is the first formal court action to result from that nearly four-year investigation.
A Highly Specific Prosecutorial Focus
The case against Zhu is distinct within the broader landscape of post-Terra legal failures. Rather than focusing on algorithmic mechanics or macroeconomic risk management, the state’s case hinges entirely on a highly concentrated, deliberate series of statements:
- Internal Abetment (3 Counts): Charges allege Zhu actively instigated internal communications leads to blast misleading templates across Telegram and email databases to suppress retail bank runs.
- Public Misrepresentation (3 Counts): Prosecutors pointed directly to three specific June 2022 (now deleted) posts published from Zhu’s personal X account, where he explicitly claimed: “Hodlnaut as a firm did not take any losses on UST, users who held/bought UST on our platform did.”
This precise framing is engineered to fulfill every metric of fraud by false representation under Singapore law, proving that the statements were demonstrably false, known to be false by executive leadership, and deployed to intentionally manipulate market behavior.
Singapore’s Broader Enforcement Signal
This criminal prosecution operates on a completely separate track from the structural oversight managed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS). While MAS has focused on introducing systemic guardrails—such as banning local retail marketing and tightening custody mandates—the CAD’s pursuit of Zhu sends a clear message to the international market: Singapore will aggressively weaponize its criminal Penal Code to hold individual digital asset executives personally liable for misrepresentations made during periods of market duress, regardless of how many years have passed.
This legal precedent will echo across competitive Asian digital hubs, including Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Seoul, which are currently testing the boundaries of their respective post-contagion consumer protection frameworks.
What Lies Ahead
Zhu has entered an initial plea of not guilty, firmly disputing all six counts, and has been assigned a formal pre-trial conference date in June. Under the terms of Section 424A of the Penal Code 1871, a conviction carries a maximum penalty of up to 20 years in prison, a punitive fine, or both, for each individual charge.
While the court action offers no immediate financial remedy for the 30,000+ Hodlnaut users whose assets remain frozen, it establishes a formal legal reckoning for the structural lack of transparency that characterized the onset of the crypto winter.
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