zkLend
An early Starknet lender backed by StarkWare itself
A lending and borrowing money market on Starknet, with a permissionless pool for anyone and a planned KYC-gated product for institutions.
- Capital raised (announced)
Recorded announced backing; this is separate from cash received, customer deposits and money recovered.
- Treasury left for the recovery fund
Company-reported treasury allocated to affected users on 25 June 2025; completed refunds not established.
Funding
| Round | Date | Announced | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 2022 |
Announced is what was said at the time. Cash actually received is rarely disclosed and is not assumed to match.
People
| Name | Role | Period | Now | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jane Ma | — | Strategy & Operations Manager, Securitize (since October 2025) | Oct 2026 | |
| Brian Fu | — | Wolver.io | Oct 2026 |
Timeline
29 March 2022
The permissionless lending product was due in the third quarter of 2022 and the institutional product early in 2023.
12 February 2025
An attacker used a rounding flaw in the Starknet contracts, taking about $9.5 million at the time. The funds were not returned.
25 June 2025
How it ended
Hack or exploit
zkLend said the February 2025 exploit had deeply eroded user confidence, and that the removal of its ZEND token from Bybit and KuCoin had cut off the liquidity it would need to relaunch. It said it would not restart the money market, would put its remaining treasury into a recovery fund for affected users, keep its claim portals online, and publish its audited code as open source.
Still alive
Open spot
zkLend is gone. Is your lending protocol still running?
Spotlight your project here.
Sources
6 sources behind this page.
- 1Delphi Digital Leads $5M Seed Round for Money Market Protocol ZkLend · CoinDesk · Mar 2022
- 2zkLend Shuts Down After $9.5M Hack—$200K Recovery Fund Launched · Cryptonews
- 3zkLend shuts down amid exploit fallout and delistings, remaining $200k redirected to users · CryptoSlate
- 4StarkNet money market, zkLend, raises $5M in seed round led by Delphi Digital · GlobeNewswire (zkLend press release) · Mar 2022
- 5LinkedIn profile of Jane Ma · LinkedIn (self-published profile, viewed by a person) · user-editable
- 6LinkedIn profile: Brian Fu - Wolver.io | LinkedIn · LinkedIn, as shown in Brave Search API results (self-published profile) · user-editable
Every figure above is clickable and opens the sources behind it. Copies were stored when each source was read, so a citation still resolves after the page it came from is gone.