He was once hailed as the "next Zuckerberg"; now he stands in a New York courtroom accused of crypto fraud.
Written by: Nicky, Foresight News
On March 23, 2026, a lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, formally 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 issuances 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 the lawsuit targets Believe, a Solana ecosystem application. Believe (formerly Clout.me) is a Solana-based social token issuance platform launched in 2025 by Pasternak. Users could create tokens without code by posting a tweet with "@launchcoin + token name" on X, using a bonding curve mechanism. When a token's market cap reached $100,000, it automatically upgraded to the Meteora liquidity pool. Positioned as an "idea crowdfunding platform," its native token LAUNCHCOIN hit a peak market cap of $370 million in May 2025.
According to the complaint, Pasternak launched the PASTERNAK token (named after himself) in January 2025 and publicly claimed to have "0 ownership" of the token on the same day. This statement successfully built a trust narrative of "no insider allocation," with the token's market cap reaching $80 million on its first day. However, within a week, its price plummeted by over 95%, and by March 2025, its market cap had shrunk to approximately $190,000.
On April 28, 2025, the platform was rebranded from Clout to Believe. On May 2, the on-chain metadata for PASTERNAK was modified to LAUNCHCOIN, though the token contract itself was not redeployed.According to the complaint, in mid-May, LAUNCHCOIN’s market cap briefly surpassed $240 million, reaching an all-time high of $0.3647.Its price trended downward continuously afterward. During this period, Pasternak and Believe’s official accounts publicly pledged at least twelve times to activate a “flywheel” buyback mechanism — purchasing the token on the open market using platform fee revenues to support its price.
On October 15, 2025, the Believe team announced a forced migration of LAUNCHCOIN to the new BELIEVE token. Holders were required to complete a 1:1 exchange by October 29; tokens not migrated by the deadline would be permanently burned. Meanwhile, the total supply of the new token expanded from 1 billion to approximately 1.333 billion, an increase of 33.3%. The complaint details the allocation of the new tokens: about 17% to current and future contributors, with a four-year vesting period and one-year lock-up; about 5% to early investors, locked up for one year; about 3% to the foundation, with no lock-up restrictions and immediately available. Original LAUNCHCOIN holders received no additional compensation, and their ownership stakes were directly diluted.
The complaint further states that on the day of the migration announcement, Pasternak publicly claimed "no individual or entity will receive tokens for at least one year," which directly contradicts the fact that the foundation received approximately 40 million tokens with immediate unlock. Additionally, the Believe team stated the supply increase was "25%," while the actual calculation shows around 33%—a discrepancy that sparked widespread skepticism and ridicule in the crypto community.
Regarding the platform's economic model, Believe charges a 2% fee on each transaction. Initially split equally between the token creator and the platform, the fee structure was adjusted in June 2025 to 70% for creators and 30% for the platform. The platform also designed a "scout" mechanism, where the first user to trigger a token launch receives 0.1% of subsequent transaction fees. The complaint estimates Believe processed approximately $6 billion in trading volume, generating total platform fees of about $54 million. As the creator of PASTERNAK, LAUNCHCOIN, and BELIEVE, Pasternak continuously received a share of creator fees. The complaint also notes that in the week following the migration announcement, on-chain data showed large-scale selling by top wallet addresses.
Pasternak's last original tweet was posted on October 16, 2025. In this long post, he admitted for the first time that he had never bought any Solana tokens before launching his first token, reaffirmed that the team received no token allocation in the initial issuance, clarified the mistake in the supply increase statement, and promised the foundation's holdings would not be sold, with the repurchase flywheel to be launched after migration was completed.
On January 14, 2026, he retweeted a post from the official Believe account: "The idea behind Believe v2 is simple: track everyone's real-time sentiment."
The official Believe account also stopped updating on that day, with its last tweet announcing: "New market launched: Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) is now open for trading." Since then, both Pasternak personally and the project's official channels have fallen completely silent on social media.
Believe v2, launched in January 2026, attempted to pivot to "sentiment markets" where users could bet on public figures' real-time popularity through perpetual bilateral markets, but failed to regain market attention. As of the lawsuit filing date, the BELIEVE token's market cap was approximately $1.2 million, having evaporated almost entirely from its all-time high.
The lawsuit cites New York General Business Law §349 and §350, California's Unfair Competition Law and False Advertising Law, along with common law claims of 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 implement constructive trust and injunctive relief for traceable digital assets if necessary. Documents show Pasternak resides in Manhattan, New York, and his controlled entity B24, Inc. is also registered in New York; platform operations and development are tied to this jurisdiction. As of press time, he has not publicly responded to the lawsuit, nor has he disclosed the specific amount of personal profits from the Believe project.
A Legendary Teenage Era
Before this legal storm, Pasternak's life story was nothing short of legendary. Born on September 6, 1999, in a Jewish family in Sydney, Australia, he grew up in the suburb of Vaucluse. At 13, he taught himself programming. In 2014, at age 14, he collaborated with a Chicago engineer during a school science class to complete the iOS game "Impossible Rush" in a few hours. The game received millions of downloads and once reached the 16th position on the U.S. App Store's overall chart. Media quickly picked up the story, calling him the "next Zuckerberg."
In January 2015, 15-year-old Pasternak turned down 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 teen social shopping app, raising approximately $2 million from institutions like Binary Capital and Greylock Partners. Flogg underperformed and shut down in late 2016. He then shifted resources to his new project Monkey, a teen video chat app. Monkey accumulated over 20 million users and was acquired by Chinese company Holla in 2018, becoming his first successfully sold startup during his teenage years.
Starting in 2018, Pasternak turned to food tech, co-founding Simulate and launching plant-based chicken nuggets NUGGS. The project received support from well-known investors like Alexis Ohanian, Jay-Z, and McCain Foods, raising over $50 million in 2021 with a company valuation exceeding $250 million. That same year, he was named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 list.
From mobile apps to food tech to Web3, Pasternak's every 转型 has been on the cusp of trends, accompanied by significant controversy and risk. As he becomes mired in legal troubles, his personal life has also taken a dramatic turn.
Since the second half of 2024, Pasternak has been publicly dating TikTok influencer Evelyn Ha. Evelyn is part of the influential Korean-American Ha sisters on social media, and Pasternak frequently shared their luxury interactions on social platforms. However, in early April 2026, netizens noticed that the Ha sisters had all unfollowed him on Instagram, and Evelyn was later revealed to be in a close relationship with a Twitch streamer. The public widely interpreted this series of actions as a sign of the end of their relationship, with some in the crypto community joking, "Finally, the budget for Hermès can be reallocated back into the flywheel."
From a teenager writing apps in a Sydney high school classroom to an entrepreneur in the defendant's seat of a New York federal court, Ben Pasternak's 26th year has brought both legal and emotional storms. He was once the "next Zuckerberg" in media reports; now his name is more often associated with "fraud," "crash," and "unfollow."