Autopsy Confirms Suicide of Chinese Crypto Executive Who Alleged 80-Hour Weeks and a 'Blacklist' Threat

The San Bernardino County coroner's office ruled on September 25 that the death of Zhuang Xinru was a suicide. She was 37, a former partner at the crypto venture firm Hack VC, and she had been found in her car late on the night of August 24, beside a stretch of Interstate 15 that runs through the Mojave desert (Red Star News).

The ruling arrived in China the way the case had already traveled — through her own words. The day before she was found, Zhuang had published a long post on X accusing Hack VC of keeping her on 13-to-14-hour days, six days a week — roughly 78 to 84 hours — even as she managed a serious illness and severe insomnia, and of threatening her with an "industry blacklist" when she tried to resign. She wrote that lawyers had offered her a settlement carrying a confidentiality clause, and that she had refused it: she would rather get no money at all than buy her silence. She had said she would publish her evidence on August 26 (@香水颂哈). She died on the 24th.

Hack VC's co-founder Alexander Pack, in a statement on September 23, said the firm was shocked and grieved by her death, that it had had no direct contact with her for more than ten months, and that it did not know the circumstances of it. No public evidence links her death to the company, and the Chinese outlets reporting the autopsy were careful to say so.

What made the case detonate on Weibo was not the firm but the arithmetic. The hashtag — "a Chinese woman executive in America's crypto circle dies by suicide" — reached the top ten of the trending board, and the detail readers kept repeating was the workweek. A 78-to-84-hour week is not an American anomaly; it is the schedule Chinese tech workers call 996, the one people emigrate to escape. Here it had followed them out.

One widely reposted summary put it plainly: she had gone public while still alive — the hours, the illness, the sleeplessness — and when the settlement came wrapped in a confidentiality clause, she chose no money over silence. Nothing yet proves the company responsible for her death, the post concluded, "but this kind of high-pressure workplace is suffocating. What exactly is the point of working yourself to death?" (@帅白白了个白). Another commenter was barer still: in this industry, he wrote, before you make your name you can easily lose everything you have — and after you make it, it is easy to die by suicide, or by what gets called suicide (@六爷阿旦).

That last note gestures at the detail Chinese readers keep returning to: the timing. She died two days before the date she had set to publish her evidence. The police ruling settles how she died; it does not settle what her final posts started. They are still on her timeline — the evidence for August 26 never came.