Brian Fu is a decentralized finance entrepreneur and co founder of zkLend, a layer 2 money market protocol on StarkNet. With more than a decade of experience in traditional finance and credit markets, he focuses on building capital efficient lending platforms that bridge institutional and retail users. Beyond zkLend, Fu has been involved in newer Web3 initiatives including Wolver.io and XRPL native DeFi project Strobe Finance.
Overview
Fu’s work sits at the intersection of credit, risk management, and blockchain scaling. At zkLend he has helped design a money market that uses zero knowledge rollup technology to reduce transaction costs while retaining Ethereum’s security properties. His more recent associations with Wolver.io and Strobe Finance expand that focus across multiple ecosystems, from Ethereum layer 2 infrastructure to XRP Ledger based decentralized finance.
Drawing on extensive experience structuring and distributing credit products in traditional banking and capital markets, Fu has positioned himself as a builder of institutional grade DeFi primitives. His projects are generally aimed at creating compliant, risk aware lending environments that can appeal to both on chain power users and regulated financial institutions.
History and Background
Before entering the crypto industry, Fu spent over 15 years in traditional finance. His career included roles at firms such as Bloomberg, Standard Chartered, Silk Road Finance, and China Merchants Capital, where he worked on credit markets, structured products, and debt advisory mandates. This background exposed him to the limitations of legacy financial infrastructure, particularly around settlement speed, transparency, and access to credit.
As interest in decentralized finance accelerated, Fu transitioned toward building on public blockchains. His experience with institutional risk frameworks, collateral management, and regulatory expectations informed the design of zkLend’s dual track product suite. This combination of capital markets expertise and protocol design is a recurring theme across his subsequent crypto ventures.
Core Projects and Roles
Fu is best known for his work at zkLend, where he serves as a co founder and core contributor to the protocol’s strategy and design. zkLend is a money market built on StarkNet, a public zk rollup scaling protocol for Ethereum that uses zero knowledge proofs to compress transactions and lower fees while preserving mainnet security guarantees.
The protocol is structured around two main products that target different user segments:
- Artemis, a permissionless lending and borrowing market designed for retail DeFi users, allowing overcollateralized loans against supported crypto assets.
- Apollo, a permissioned offering aimed at institutional and corporate users that require know your customer and anti money laundering compliant access to on chain credit.
Outside zkLend, Fu is associated with Wolver.io, an additional Web3 initiative focused on emerging DeFi opportunities, and Strobe Finance, which is positioned as a decentralized finance platform built on the XRP Ledger. These projects extend his involvement into new protocol environments while maintaining an emphasis on lending, liquidity, and capital efficiency.
Technology and Focus Areas
Fu’s work with zkLend centers on the use of StarkNet’s zero knowledge rollup technology to achieve higher throughput and lower transaction costs than Ethereum mainnet. By settling batched transactions on Ethereum while executing most activity off chain, zk rollups allow money markets to support more granular risk controls and more frequent position adjustments at reduced cost. This design is intended to make borrowing and lending viable for smaller deposits and a wider range of assets.
The zkLend protocol incorporates features such as isolated money market pools, protocol to protocol lending, differentiated collateral and borrowing factors, and variable liquidation parameters. Its native token, ZEND, is used for protocol governance, staking based reward boosts, and sharing in a portion of the interest revenue generated by lending pools when staked within the protocol.
Through Strobe Finance, Fu’s work also touches the XRP Ledger ecosystem, where DeFi applications are still comparatively early. By experimenting with XRPL native instruments and liquidity structures, the project aims to explore how credit and yield products can be adapted to networks with different execution environments and design constraints than Ethereum.
Use Cases and Market Position
zkLend is positioned as a foundational money market or “money lego” within the emerging StarkNet ecosystem. Its permissionless Artemis markets target DeFi users who want to earn yield by supplying assets or unlock liquidity by borrowing against their holdings. Apollo’s permissioned structure, in contrast, is designed for institutions that require whitelisting, counterparty due diligence, and tighter control over liquidity pools.
Fu’s broader portfolio of projects illustrates a thematic focus on bringing credit markets on chain across multiple environments. Wolver.io and Strobe Finance complement zkLend by exploring new collateral types, alternative base chains, and varied risk profiles. Collectively, these efforts seek to create interoperable, programmatic credit rails that can support market makers, traders, and longer term investors.
Funding and Ecosystem Involvement
In March 2022, zkLend announced a 5 million dollar seed round that supported the build out of its core team and the launch of the Artemis and Apollo products. The funding round highlighted interest in StarkNet native DeFi from venture funds and ecosystem backers that specialize in Ethereum scaling solutions and institutional DeFi. This capital has been directed toward smart contract development, risk engineering, and business development.
Fu and the zkLend team engage with the broader StarkNet and Ethereum communities through developer collaborations, security reviews, and liquidity partnerships with other protocols. His work with Strobe Finance similarly reflects participation in the XRP Ledger ecosystem, where new DeFi platforms are experimenting with lending, liquidity provision, and yield strategies tailored to that network.
Risks and Considerations
As with other DeFi lending protocols, the projects associated with Fu operate in a high risk environment. Smart contract vulnerabilities, oracle failures, and liquidity shocks in volatile crypto markets can lead to rapid losses for lenders and borrowers. Operating on newer networks such as StarkNet and XRPL also introduces technical and ecosystem risks related to tooling, interoperability, and network security.
Regulatory developments are another important factor for money markets that aim to accommodate institutional users. Compliance requirements around know your customer, anti money laundering, and securities classifications may evolve in ways that affect how protocols like zkLend, Wolver.io, and Strobe Finance are structured or accessed in different jurisdictions. Prospective users should carefully evaluate these risks, the collateral accepted, and each protocol’s risk management framework before allocating capital.
