A professional poker player who says he once turned a Stratis stake into a return of more than 1,000 times has sued Jump Trading in Chicago, seeking at least $500 million over losses tied to the 2022 collapse of Terra's UST stablecoin and its sister token LUNA.
The plaintiff, Hu Zhewen, is a Chinese Texas Hold'em player and long-time crypto investor. Chinese financial outlet Caixin, which first reported the case on September 24, described a career of three large crypto bets across three market cycles: the ICO boom, algorithmic stablecoins and, most recently, AI tokens. The first paid off spectacularly. The last two did not.
Jump, one of the world's best-known quantitative trading firms, is named alongside affiliated crypto entities and executives. Hu has also filed claims, including securities fraud, against Zhang Yongfeng, a computer science professor whose AI token project he backed in 2025.
$80 million in, $800 million on paper, almost nothing out
According to the Caixin account, Hu put roughly $80 million into UST and LUNA between May 2021 and May 2022. At the peak, the market value of those holdings exceeded $800 million. Then the peg broke. UST lost its dollar link in May 2022 and LUNA fell to almost zero within days, erasing about $40 billion in value across the ecosystem and wiping out Hu's position along with it.
Why sue Jump rather than Terraform Labs? The trading firm's role in propping up Terra has been under legal scrutiny for years. The SEC's case established that when UST slipped to around $0.90 in May 2021, a Jump entity bought large amounts of the stablecoin to restore the peg, while Terraform publicly credited the algorithm itself. Jump subsidiary Tai Mo Shan settled with the SEC in December 2024 and paid about $123 million without admitting or denying the findings.
That episode sits squarely inside Hu's buying window. An investor who kept adding to UST and LUNA after May 2021 did so after the stablecoin had apparently survived a stress test on its own, which is exactly the impression regulators later said was false. The court filings themselves have not yet been made public in English-language coverage, so the precise legal theory Hu's lawyers are advancing is not clear, but the timing lines up with the conduct already described in the SEC settlement.
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Not the only claim against Jump
Hu is not alone in going after the firm. In December 2025, Todd Snyder, the administrator of the Terraform Labs Wind Down Trust, sued Jump, former Jump Crypto president Kanav Kariya and co-founder William DiSomma for about $4 billion. That complaint alleges Jump secured the right to buy up to 65 million LUNA at $0.40 per token, far below market prices, which gave it a financial reason to keep its stabilization role quiet. It also claims Jump bought LUNA from the Luna Foundation Guard at a roughly 40% discount.
Terra founder Do Kwon was sentenced to 15 years in prison in December 2025 after pleading guilty to fraud. With the founder convicted and the company in wind-down, trading counterparties like Jump have become the main remaining targets for anyone trying to recover losses. Two parallel cases, one from the estate and one from a single large investor, will likely put pressure on the same set of facts.
The third bet
The claims against Zhang Yongfeng involve a separate and more recent loss. Zhang entered Tsinghua University's computer science department in 2007 and is now a tenured associate professor of computer science at Rutgers University. According to Caixin, Hu invested several million dollars in January 2025 into a token issued by an organization Zhang founded. That token has since dropped more than 99.6% from its 2025 peak.
AI-themed tokens were one of the defining trades of early 2025, and many have since given back nearly all of their gains. Few of those collapses have ended in court, and even fewer with an academic founder named as a defendant. How a securities fraud claim against an individual professor fares will say a lot about how US courts treat token issuers who are not running conventional companies. Recent cases have shown how quickly allegations of a token “money grab” can surface once prices collapse, but turning such accusations into a winning lawsuit is a much higher bar.
A shifting enforcement backdrop
Private litigation is carrying more weight as federal regulators pull back. The SEC is shrinking, with Commissioner Hester Peirce leaving on October 2 and the commission down to two members. Criminal cases still land, as the recent $53 million pig-butchering laundering charges show, but civil recovery for investors increasingly depends on plaintiffs and bankruptcy estates.
Poker circles know Hu as a serious tournament player. He has 58 cashes and five final tables at the World Series of Poker and about $1.67 million in lifetime tournament winnings, with a best result of nearly $760,000 for a runner-up finish in a $10,000 buy-in event. His crypto swings dwarf all of that. A $500 million claim would make this one of the largest individual investor lawsuits to come out of the Terra collapse.
FAQ
Who is suing Jump Trading for $500 million?
Chinese poker player and crypto investor Hu Zhewen filed the suit in Chicago against Jump Trading and affiliated entities and executives, seeking at least $500 million.
How much did Hu Zhewen lose on Terra LUNA?
He invested about $80 million in UST and LUNA between May 2021 and May 2022; the holdings were worth more than $800 million at their peak before LUNA fell to nearly zero.
Why is Rutgers professor Zhang Yongfeng named in the case?
Hu invested several million dollars in January 2025 in a token issued by an organization Zhang founded, which later fell more than 99.6%, and has brought claims including securities fraud against him.
