On March 23, 2026, a lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of New York Federal Court, officially naming 26-year-old Australian entrepreneur Ben Pasternak and his entities B24, Inc. and Believe Foundation as defendants.
This class action lawsuit, initiated by investors Joshua Lee and Pierre Montmeas, accuses Pasternak of engaging in deceptive business practices and false advertising through three consecutive token offerings and one forced migration, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for consumers. By this time, nearly half a year had passed since his last original social media post.
The core of this lawsuit points to a Solana ecosystem application named Believe. Believe (formerly Clout.me) was a Solana social token launch platform launched in 2025, founded by Pasternak. Users could create tokens without code simply by posting a tweet on platform X with "@launchcoin + token name". It utilized a bonding curve mechanism, automatically upgrading to a Meteora liquidity pool once the market cap reached $100,000. The platform was positioned as an "idea crowdfunding platform," and its platform token LAUNCHCOIN reached a peak market cap of $370 million in May 2025.
According to the complaint, Pasternak launched a token named after himself, PASTERNAK, in January 2025, publicly stating on the same day that he had "zero ownership" of the token. This statement successfully built a trust narrative of "no insider allocation," and the token's market cap briefly touched $80 million on its first day. However, within a week, the price plummeted over 95%, and by March 2025, its market cap was only about $190,000.
On April 28, 2025, the platform was renamed from Clout to Believe; on May 2, the on-chain metadata for PASTERNAK was changed to LAUNCHCOIN, though the token contract itself was not redeployed. The complaint points out that in mid-May, the LAUNCHCOIN market cap once exceeded $240 million, reaching an all-time high of $0.3647. The price continued to decline afterwards, while Pasternak and the official Believe account publicly promised at least twelve times during this period to initiate a "flywheel" buyback mechanism, using platform fee revenue to purchase tokens on the open market to support the price.
On October 15, 2025, the Believe team announced the forced migration of LAUNCHCOIN to a new token, BELIEVE. Holders had to complete a 1:1 exchange by October 29; tokens not migrated by the deadline would be permanently destroyed.
Simultaneously, the total supply of the new token inflated from 1 billion to approximately 1.333 billion, an increase of 33.3%. The complaint details the allocation of the new tokens: about 17% allocated to current and future contributors, subject to a four-year vesting period and a one-year lockup; about 5% allocated to early investors, locked for one year; and about 3% allocated to the foundation, with no lockup restrictions, immediately available.
Original LAUNCHCOIN holders received no additional compensation and saw their ownership directly diluted.
The complaint further states that Pasternak publicly stated on the day of the migration announcement that "no individual or entity will get tokens for at least a year," a statement clearly contradicted by the fact that the foundation's approximately 40 million tokens were immediately unlocked. Additionally, the Believe team described the supply increase as "25%," while the actual mathematical calculation was approximately 33%, a discrepancy that sparked widespread skepticism and ridicule within the crypto community.
Regarding the platform's economic model, Believe charged approximately a 2% fee on each transaction, initially split equally between the token creator and the platform, but adjusted in June 2025 to 70% for the creator and 30% for the platform. The platform also designed a "scout" mechanism, where the first user to trigger a token launch would receive 0.1% of subsequent transaction fees. The complaint estimates that Believe processed approximately $6 billion in trading volume, with total platform fee revenue around $54 million.
As the creator of PASTERNAK, LAUNCHCOIN, and BELIEVE, Pasternak himself continuously received a share of the creator fees. The complaint also notes that in the week the migration was announced, on-chain data showed significant selling activity from top wallet addresses.
Pasternak's last original tweet was posted on October 16, 2025. In this lengthy post, he admitted for the first time that he had never purchased any Solana token before launching his first one, reiterated that the team received no token allocation in the initial offering, clarified the misstatement regarding the supply increase, promised that the foundation's holdings would not be sold, and committed to initiating the buyback flywheel after the migration was complete.
On January 14, 2026, he retweeted a post from the official Believe account, which read: "The idea behind Believe v2 is simple: track everyone's real-time sentiment."
Updates from the official Believe account also stopped on that day, with its last tweet announcing: "New market listing: Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) is now open for trading." Thereafter, both Pasternak's personal and the project's official social media fell completely silent.
Believe v2, launched in January 2026, attempted to pivot to a "sentiment market," allowing users to bet on the real-time popularity of public figures through a perpetual bilateral market, but failed to regain market attention. As of the filing date, the BELIEVE token's market cap was approximately $1.2 million, having evaporated from its historical high.
This lawsuit invokes New York General Business Law Sections 349 and 350, California's Unfair Competition Law and False Advertising Law, alongside common law claims such as negligent misrepresentation and unjust enrichment. The plaintiffs request the court to order the defendants to compensate for actual losses, return platform and creator fees, and, where necessary, impose constructive trusts and injunctive relief on traceable digital assets.
Documents show Pasternak resides in Manhattan, New York, and his controlled entity B24, Inc. is also registered in New York, with platform operations and development pointing to this jurisdiction. As of the time of writing, he has not publicly responded to the lawsuit nor disclosed the specific amount of profit he gained from the Believe project.
A Legendary Teenage Era
Prior to this legal storm, Pasternak's life resume was legendary. Born on September 6, 1999, in Sydney, Australia, into a Jewish family, he grew up in the Vaucluse suburb. He taught himself programming at age 13. In 2014, at 14 years old, he collaborated with an engineer from Chicago during a school science class and completed the iOS game "Impossible Rush" in a few hours, which garnered millions of downloads and briefly reached No. 16 on the US App Store overall chart. Media quickly picked up the story, dubbing him "the next Zuckerberg."
In January 2015, the 15-year-old Pasternak rejected internship offers from Facebook and Google, dropped out of high school, and flew alone to New York to seek venture capital. In April of the same year, he founded Flogg, a social shopping app for teenagers, raising about $2 million from firms like Binary Capital and Greylock Partners.
Flogg's performance fell short of expectations and it shut down by the end of 2016. He promptly redirected resources to a new project, Monkey, a video chat app for teenagers.
Monkey accumulated over 20 million users and was acquired by the Chinese company Holla in 2018, becoming his first successfully sold startup from his teenage years.
Starting in 2018, Pasternak shifted to the food tech sector, co-founding Simulate and launching the plant-based chicken nugget NUGGS. The project attracted support from notable investors like Alexis Ohanian, Jay-Z, and McCain Foods, raising over $50 million in 2021, with the company's valuation once exceeding $250 million. That same year, he was named to the Forbes "30 Under 30" list.
From mobile apps to food tech, and then to Web3, Pasternak's every pivot landed on trending sectors, accompanied by significant controversy and risk. And as he finds himself deep in legal troubles, his personal life has also taken a dramatic turn.
Since the second half of 2024, Pasternak was publicly dating TikTok influencer Evelyn Ha. Evelyn is from the influential Korean-American Ha family of three sisters, and Pasternak frequently shared their luxurious interactions on social platforms.
However, in early April 2026, netizens noticed that the Ha sisters had simultaneously unfollowed him on Instagram, and Evelyn was later revealed to be in a close relationship with a Twitch streamer. The outside world widely interpreted this series of actions as signals of the relationship's end, with some in the crypto community joking that "the Hermès budget can finally be reinvested into the flywheel."
From the teenager writing apps in a Sydney high school classroom to the entrepreneur standing as a defendant in a New York federal court, Ben Pasternak's 26th year has brought both legal and emotional storms. He was once the media's "next Zuckerberg," but now his name is more often associated with "fraud," "collapse," and "unfollow."
