zkLend
Last changed 2026-11-01 · Fact-check review — Fact-check review (verdict: revise): the reviewer checked the page's claims against its sources; the trust score did not change. Version history →
Why this score
| Every page starts at | 65 |
| Concerns that are not fraud | -6 |
| Incidents it suffered (e.g. hacks) | -20 |
| Problems around it, caused by others | -2.3 |
| Long-running | +6 |
| Sum | 43 |
- No longer operating, so capped at 50.
- The penalty for incidents it suffered is capped at 20 points.
- 1 section set aside: the claims did not hold up in a fact-check, pending correction.
Score: 50/100 (kept between 0 and 100)
How scoring works →Page reliability: Fact-checked 2026-11-01 · 8 of 9 claims confirmed · 1 need better sources
anchored·ruTzUu…HPbMSummary
zkLend was a non-custodial decentralized money-market lending protocol on Starknet, an Ethereum zero-knowledge rollup, founded in 2022 by Brian Fu and Jane Ma and backed by investors including Delphi Digital, Three Arrows Capital, Alameda Research and StarkWare. In February 2025 an attacker chained an empty-market deposit, flash-loan 'donations' and a rounding error in the lending_accumulator mechanism to drain approximately $9.57 million, despite prior Nethermind audits; SlowMist alleges the attacker is the same actor behind the 2023 EraLend exploit. The protocol permanently shut down in June 2025, allocating its remaining approximately $200,000 treasury to a user recovery fund, leaving most affected users largely uncompensated.
Connected Entities
10 entities · 60 linked investigations- KuCoin→mentioned with→Ethereum(60%)
- zkLend (Starknet)→mentioned with→Starknet(80%)
- zkLend (Starknet)→mentioned with→KuCoin(65%)
- zkLend (Starknet)→mentioned with→EraLend(70%)
- zkLend (Starknet)→mentioned with→Ethereum(80%)
- Starknet→mentioned with→Ethereum(80%)
- Starknet→mentioned with→Railgun(65%)
- Starknet→mentioned with→EraLend(60%)
- zkLend (Starknet)→mentioned with→zkLend(70%)
- zkLend (Starknet)→mentioned with→Railgun(70%)
- + 19 more
Timeline(13 events)
February 2022
zkLend founded by Brian Fu and Jane Ma.
March 2022
zkLend raises a $5 million seed round led by Delphi Digital, with Three Arrows Capital, StarkWare, Alameda Research and others participating.
GlobeNewswireJuly 2022
zkLend testnet opens.
July 2023
EraLend, a lending protocol on zkSync, is exploited via a read-only reentrancy vulnerability (reported losses differ: about $2.76 million or about $3.4 million). SlowMist later alleges the same attacker carried out the zkLend exploit.
Halborn SecurityOctober 2023
zkLend's Cairo 1 smart contracts, audited by Nethermind, are deployed on Starknet ahead of Starknet Regenesis.
zkLend DocumentationOctober 2023
zkLend officially launches on Starknet mainnet with its Artemis and Apollo environments.
February 2025
Attacker manipulates the wstETH market's lending_accumulator through flash loans and rounding errors, draining approximately $9.57 million in ETH, USDC, STRK and USDT (reported as February 11–12 or February 12).
Rekt NewsFebruary 2025
zkLend suspends withdrawals, discloses the exploit and offers a 10% white-hat bounty (about 3,300 ETH) with a February 14 midnight UTC deadline and a promise of no legal action.
CoinTelegraphFebruary 2025
Stolen funds are bridged to Ethereum; the attacker tries to launder 706.4 WETH through Railgun, whose policies return the funds to the originating address (dated February 12 on one page and February 14 on the other).
Rekt NewsFebruary 2025
Bounty deadline passes with no response or return of funds; zkLend says it will pursue legal action and engage forensics firm zeroShadow.
CoinTelegraphMarch 2025
zkLend opens a Recovery Portal for affected users, with full compensation for unaffected-pool deposits and partial compensation for affected pools, including about 82,818 recovery NFTs.
Crypto.newsMarch 2025
The attacker loses 2,930 ETH (about $5.4 million) by depositing it into a fake Tornado Cash phishing site (tornadoeth.cash) and posts an on-chain message to zkLend admitting the loss; reports date this on or around March 31 or approximately April 1, 2025.
Crypto.newsJune 2025
zkLend announces the permanent shutdown of operations, citing the exploit's erosion of user confidence and the delisting of ZEND from Bybit and KuCoin, and allocates its remaining approximately $200,000 treasury to a user recovery fund.
DL NewsDecision Log
- slot 464257227 · hash Fe3AYD9NARnobCNEh44WQDEJrB9a1QEjXPsXbbCD3Fi2
- slot 464257223 · hash 9WKaES4PNPvEsZAeqb3mKGhecyLTH9VYaTJVLWyKeBSf
- slot 455357504 · hash EeZ7mZcJewzhe9MAfA7ebVhfGEupG1qXw7DTj2YqPb3C
- slot 422622630 · hash 5uQVG3QykBYicCqYxRy5oLdCuFCBsEjgaKvM4VdqFvMz
This investigation is cryptographically anchored to the Solana blockchain (4 decisions). 28 of 35 cited source URLs have an Internet Archive snapshot.
model: claude-code-merge-writer
generated: 5/4/2026, 2:54:25 AM
last updated: 11/1/2026, 10:17:52 PM
7 viewsavoid.net — verified advice for a post-truth world