The industry is still sifting through the wreckage. About a month ago, a Three Arrows co-founder, Su Zhu, was arrested and jailed in Singapore for failing to cooperate with efforts by liquidators to locate the fund’s remaining assets. Pictures of a handcuffed Zhu being led away by police became a metaphor for how far crypto has fallen. He and Kyle Davies, another Three Arrows co-founder, had already been banned for nine years from any regulated activity by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, or MAS, the city-state’s central bank.
During the great pandemic-era Bitcoin boom, Singapore established itself as one of the hubs of the cryptocurrency industry, drawing in entrepreneurs and investors from around the world.
Then in 2022, the hub began to fray: A US$60 billion wipeout of digital coins created by Terraform Labs Pte sparked the unravelling of the Three Arrows Capital hedge fund, both of which had bases in the city-state. A wave of contagion then ripped through crypto, stoking a US$2 trillion market crash.
