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On Yarwood Avenue, in a leafy enclave off Dunearn Road in Singapore’s Bukit Timah district, the bougainvillea still grows over the gates and the evening air still smells of rain on tropical grass. From the street, the house looks like any other Good Class Bungalow in the Kilburn Estate — sprawling, low-slung, discreet behind its fence. But in the four years since it changed hands, no private residence in Singapore has carried a heavier story. This is the house that Three Arrows Capita Su Zhu built.
Three Arrows Capital — universally known as 3AC — was co-founded in 2012 by two young traders: Su Zhu, a former Credit Suisse derivatives trader, and Kyle Davies, a former flow trader. The pair started small, arbitraging the fractional price differences of Bitcoin across global exchanges. By the 2020s, 3AC had become one of the crypto industry’s most influential hedge funds, managing an estimated US$18 billion at its peak and backing tokens like Solana, Avalanche and Axie Infinity. Zhu became the public face of the fund — a magnetic, prolific Twitter presence whose “supercycle” thesis held that institutional adoption would lift Bitcoin indefinitely. Davies was quieter, but together they sat atop a fortune that seemed, at the time, limitless.
In December 2021, Zhu and his wife Tao Yaqiong bought a Good Class Bungalow. GCBs are the city-state’s most exclusive residential class — prime plots of at least 15,070 square feet across 39 gazetted enclaves, legally restricted to Singapore citizens, and treated less as homes than as vessels for generational wealth.
A caveat was lodged: S$48.8 million, roughly US$35 million, for 31,863 square feet of 999-year leasehold land on Yarwood Avenue — about S$1,532 per square foot, one of the largest GCB deals of the year. The house was the crown jewel of a three-property spree that also included a Dalvey Road GCB (S$28.5 million) and a strata bungalow on Balmoral Road (S$6.25 million).
Then, in March 2022, came a detail that would echo for years: the title was transferred into a trust for the couple’s three-year-old son.
The house itself took a strange turn. The Yarwood Avenue bungalow became a working urban farm — a permaculture landscape of lakes, gardens, ducks, chickens and dragonflies, offering guided tours and private dining through a company co-founded by Zhu’s wife from early 2023. Crypto executives gathered there. It might have been a retreat, a rebirth, or simply a holding pattern. But the liquidators were watching the address — and in September 2023, their surveillance paid off. Tracked from the mansion to Changi Airport, Zhu was arrested at the terminal on September 29, 2023 while attempting to leave the country, days after being sentenced to four months in prison for contempt of court. Singapore’s central bank had already barred both Zhu and Davies from the financial industry for nine years.
Three Arrows Capital’s supercycle had one fatal weakness — leverage. When the TerraUSD stablecoin and its sister token Luna collapsed in May 2022, the contagion swept through 3AC’s portfolio. Lenders called their loans. The fund could not pay.
On June 27, 2022, a British Virgin Islands court ordered 3AC into liquidation, with creditors claiming around US$3.5 billion. One of the largest hedge fund collapses in history.
And within days, the house on Yarwood Avenue made its next appearance in the story. A WhatsApp message began circulating among Singapore property agents, advertising a very urgent sale of a Yarwood Avenue GCB. Crypto researcher FatManTerra alleged that Zhu wanted the proceeds routed to a Dubai account rather than to creditors. Whether or not that was the plan, the message transformed the house from a private trophy into a public symbol.
