On August 26, she was going to publicly release all the evidence from her time at Hack VC. On the evening of August 24, she died beside a desert ramp.

The deceased was Hsin-Ju Chuang, 37, a former partner and head of platform at Hack VC. She led growth at Stellar in 2017, and joined the Solana team as head of growth in 2018, when it had fewer than ten people.
At 9:48 p.m. on August 24, the California Highway Patrol arrived at the southbound I-15 Fields Road exit ramp, in that stretch of the Mojave Desert. She was pronounced dead at the scene. The news was not dug up until September 23. For an entire month, nobody in the industry knew she was gone.
The core of the long post she wrote before her death was just one sentence: I would rather take $0 than accept a settlement that forces me to stay silent forever. She fired all the lawyers from sanfordheisler and said she would release all the evidence on August 26. @hsinju has not posted anything since that day.
She laid out the money in the post. The year before she left, her annual salary had just been raised from $250,000 to $300,000, with a $30,000 bonus, a promise of carry, and an opportunity to enter the GP entity. She stayed full-time for only 7 months. Writing this was meant to preempt the claim that she was “just trying to extort money.” The other side was Hack VC, which managed $600 million to $700 million.
This is what she said she went through. Working 13 to 14 hours a day, six days a week, sleeping 0 to 4 hours a night, with diagnosed Graves’ disease, hyperthyroidism, and severe insomnia. She repeatedly asked to leave, but the company refused, saying she had to finish the events for hacksummit and Korea Blockchain Week, and that if she did not, they would blacklist her in the industry. She later attempted suicide.
It got uglier afterward. After her suicide attempt, she even stated in writing that she did not plan to sue, as long as they did not retaliate or smear her. One month after she made that statement, there was a problem with her COBRA health insurance. The company pushed her off to a third-party customer-service representative, and it dragged on for nearly four months until she paid a lawyer to fix it.
The calls for reconciliation going around the industry now are the most disgusting part: don’t tear into each other so easily, don’t push people to the brink. She was the one threatened with being blacklisted from the industry, she was the one whose health insurance was delayed for four months, and she was the one who died by the ramp. All the people urging reconciliation are on the side that is still alive.
The reason this hits me so hard is that I have signed that kind of paper. In 2019, I worked in operations at a small project and was owed three months of wages. The boss shoved a paper at me: sign it and get 60%; refuse and get nothing, plus they would tell the industry I was unreliable. I signed, took over $40,000, and have stayed silent until today. Her annual salary was $300,000, and her carry was almost within reach. She said no.
The ETH address she left at the end of her long post is still active and can be checked on-chain.
0x68c10776C5c05Cbf5B4C2318bE02D61B9f06B875。
She wrote in the original post that the outcome of this matter would most likely be extremely bad for her, even death, and that she accepted it. The cause of death has not yet been determined, and the autopsy report will take more than six months to be released.
Not a single piece of the evidence promised for August 26 has appeared to this day. The September hacksummit went ahead as scheduled, the events in Korea proceeded as planned, and the familiar faces in the industry were still onstage talking about growth.