He was once touted as "the next Zuckerberg," but now he stands in the dock in New York for cryptocurrency fraud.
Written by: Nicky, Foresight News
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, accused Pasternak of engaging in deceptive business practices and false advertising through three consecutive token offerings and one forced migration, causing consumers to suffer hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. At this point, nearly six months had passed since he last posted original social media content.
At the heart of this lawsuit lies a Solana ecosystem application called Believe. Believe (formerly Clout.me) is a Solana social token issuance platform launched in 2025 by Pasternak. Users could create tokens without code simply by tweeting "@launchcoin + token name" on the X platform. It employed a bond curve mechanism, automatically upgrading to the Meteora liquidity pool once the market capitalization reached $100,000. Positioned as an "idea crowdfunding platform," its platform token, LAUNCHCOIN, reached a peak market capitalization of $370 million in May 2025.
According to the indictment, Pasternak launched its own token, PASTERNAK, in January 2025, and publicly declared on the same day that it had "zero ownership" of the token. This statement successfully created a trust narrative of "no insider allocation," and the token's market capitalization once reached $80 million on its first day. However, within a week, the price plummeted by more than 95%, and by March 2025, its market capitalization had fallen to only about $190,000.
On April 28, 2025, the platform was renamed Believe from Clout; on May 2, PASTERNAK's on-chain metadata was changed to LAUNCHCOIN, but the token contract itself was not redeployed. The indictment states that in mid-May, LAUNCHCOIN's market capitalization once exceeded $240 million, reaching an all-time high of $0.3647. The price subsequently continued to decline, and during this period, Pasternak and Believe's official accounts publicly promised at least twelve times to launch a "flywheel" buyback mechanism, that is, to use platform fee revenue to buy tokens on the open market to support the price.
On October 15, 2025, the Believe team announced the forced migration of LAUNCHCOIN to the new token BELIEVE. Holders were required to complete the 1:1 exchange by October 29th; tokens not migrated by the deadline would be permanently destroyed. Simultaneously, the total supply of the new token swelled from 1 billion to approximately 1.333 billion, an increase of 33.3%. The lawsuit detailed the allocation of the new tokens: approximately 17% were allocated to current and future contributors, with a four-year vesting period and a one-year lock-up period; approximately 5% were allocated to early investors, with a one-year lock-up period; and approximately 3% were allocated to the foundation, with no lock-up restrictions and immediate availability. Existing LAUNCHCOIN holders received no additional compensation, and their shareholding was directly diluted.
The indictment further points out that Pasternak publicly stated on the day of the migration announcement that "no individual or entity will receive tokens for at least one year," a statement that clearly contradicts the fact that approximately 40 million tokens from the foundation were immediately unlocked. Furthermore, the Believe team described the supply increase as "25%," while the actual mathematical calculation shows approximately 33%, a discrepancy that has sparked widespread skepticism and ridicule within the crypto community.
Regarding its platform economic model, Believe charges approximately 2% of each transaction as a fee, initially split equally between the token creator and the platform. This was adjusted to 70% for the creator and 30% for the platform after June 2025. The platform also features a "scouting" mechanism, where the first user to trigger a token launch receives 0.1% of subsequent transaction fees. The indictment estimates that Believe processed approximately $6 billion in transactions, generating about $54 million in total platform fee revenue. As the creator of PASTERNAK, LAUNCHCOIN, and BELIEVE, Pasternak himself continuously received a share of the creator fees. The indictment also alleges that during the week the migration announcement was released, on-chain data showed a large-scale sell-off by 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 tokens before the launch of the first token, reiterated that the team did not receive any token allocation in the initial offering, clarified the oversight in the description of the supply increase, promised that the foundation's holdings would not be sold, and that a buyback flywheel would be launched after the migration was completed.
On January 14, 2026, he retweeted a tweet from the official Believe account, which read: "The idea behind Believe v2 is simple: track everyone's real-time emotions."
Believe's official account also stopped updating that day, with the last tweet announcing: "New marketplace launch: Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) is now available for trading." After that, neither Pasternak personally nor the project's official social media fell into complete silence.
Launched in January 2026, Believe v2 attempted to shift towards an "emotional market," allowing users to bet on the real-time popularity of public figures through a perpetual two-sided market, but failed to regain market attention. As of the date of the lawsuit, the market capitalization of the BELIEVE token was approximately $1.2 million, having evaporated from its all-time high.
This lawsuit cites New York State General Business Law Sections 349 and 350, California's unfair competition law and false advertising law, and also raises common law claims such as negligent misrepresentation and unjust enrichment. The plaintiff is requesting the court to order the defendant to compensate for actual losses, return platform and creator fees, and, where necessary, establish a presumed trust and injunctive relief for traceable digital assets. Documents show that Pasternak resides in Manhattan, New York, and the registered address of B24, Inc., which he controls, is also located in New York, indicating that platform operation and development are directed to that jurisdiction. As of press time, he has not publicly responded to the lawsuit, nor has he disclosed the specific amount of personal profit he received from the Believe project.
Legendary teenage years
Before this legal storm, Pasternak's resume was nothing short of legendary. Born on September 6, 1999, into a Jewish family in Sydney, Australia, he grew up in the suburb of Vaucluse. He taught himself programming at age 13, and in 2014, at the age of 14, he collaborated with a Chicago engineer in a school science class to complete the iOS game "Impossible Rush" in hours, garnering millions of downloads and reaching number 16 on the US App Store's overall chart. The media quickly seized on this story, calling him "the next Zuckerberg."
In January 2015, 15-year-old Pasternak rejected internship offers from Facebook and Google, dropped out of high school, and flew to New York alone to seek venture capital. That April, he founded Flogg, a social shopping app for teenagers, raising approximately $2 million from firms such as Binary Capital and Greylock Partners. Flogg underperformed and shut down at the end of 2016. He then poured his resources into his new project, Monkey, a video chat app for teenagers. Monkey amassed over 20 million users and was acquired by the Chinese company Holla in 2018, becoming his first successfully sold startup during his teenage years.
Starting in 2018, Pasternak shifted his focus to food technology, co-founding Simulate and launching plant-based chicken nuggets. The project garnered support from prominent investors such as Alexis Ohanian, Jay-Z, and McCain Foods, raising over $50 million in funding in 2021, at one point reaching a valuation of over $250 million. That same year, he was named to Forbes' "30 Under 30" list.
From mobile apps to food technology, and then to Web3, Pasternak's every transformation has been on the rise, but also accompanied by enormous controversy and risk. And as he became embroiled in litigation, his personal life also took a dramatic turn.
Starting in the second half of 2024, Pasternak publicly dated TikTok influencer Evelyn Ha. Evelyn is from the influential Korean-American Ha sisters, and Pasternak frequently shared lavish interactions between the two on social media. However, in early April 2026, netizens discovered that the Ha sisters had simultaneously unfollowed him on Instagram, and Evelyn was subsequently revealed to have a close relationship with a Twitch streamer. This series of actions was widely interpreted as a sign that their relationship had ended, with some in the crypto community jokingly remarking, "Finally, he can put his Hermès budget back into his flywheel."
From a teenager writing apps in a Sydney high school classroom to an entrepreneur in the dock of a New York federal court, Ben Pasternak's 26th year has brought him both legal and emotional turmoil. He was once hailed by the media as "the next Zuckerberg," but now his name is more often associated with "fraud," "collapse," and "unfollowing."
