Searching for missing ingredients in the Cake Group saga

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Hi readers,

Writing about someone’s nanny was not on my bingo card for 2024.

I make no apologies. The story you are (hopefully) about to read has a lot of details about things that have nothing to do with tech and everything to do with an ongoing fight in the Singapore courts.

This is yet another story in the saga of the Cake Group, the parent company of Bake, formerly known as Cake DeFi. If you don’t know, they were once big in the decentralized finance crypto space, managing almost US$1 billion in customer assets. Last Friday, a hearing was held in Singapore’s Supreme Court to determine if the company should be liquidated.

I know. That doesn’t offer any clarity on why I’m writing about a nanny. You’ll have to read the story for that, which also has references to people like Toby Hoenisch, founder of crypto wallet TenX, and incidents such as the Dao hack of 2016.

All of these details focus on Julian Hosp, who is the CEO of the Cake Group. He wasn’t very thrilled about the story either, judging from this tweet.

A lot of people online have asked why we didn’t focus more on U-Zyn Chua, the former CTO of Cake, who initiated the current case. The short answer is: We couldn’t get Hosp to talk to us, although we’re still hoping he will. We still want to hear his side of the story.

— Scott Shuey, journalist at Tech in Asia

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Image credit: Timmy Loen

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