A class action lawsuit filed March 23, 2026, in the Southern District of New York, styled Lee v. Pasternak (Case No. 1:26-cv-02368), names Ben Pasternak, the 26-year-old Australian founder of memecoin launchpad Believe, along with his company B24 Inc. and the Believe Foundation, as defendants in a case alleging systematic fraud against retail cryptocurrency investors. The complaint is brought by plaintiffs Joshua Lee of California and Pierre Montmeas, a French citizen, on behalf of all token holders who lost money between January 8, 2025, and March 23, 2026. It accuses Pasternak of lying about his token holdings, breaking public commitments to buy back tokens, and executing a migration that wiped out users who did not act in time.

Pasternak built his reputation long before entering crypto. He created Monkey, a live social video app that reached more than 10 million users, and later co-founded NUGGS, a plant-based food startup subsequently rebranded as Simulate, which raised $50 million at a $250 million valuation with backers including Jay-Z. Forbes named him to its 30 Under 30 list in 2021, and Time included him in its Most Influential Teenagers list in 2016. That track record gave retail investors reason to trust his promises about Believe and its associated tokens, a trust the lawsuit alleges he systematically exploited.

The tokens at the center of the case, $PASTERNAK, $LAUNCHCOIN, and $BELIEVE, all ran on the Solana blockchain. Solana is a public ledger network known for low transaction fees, a feature that made Believe's model viable at scale. The platform let anyone create and launch a token simply by replying to the @launchcoin account on X, with no dedicated crypto wallet required. Believe charged fees on every trade and split that revenue evenly, with a 50/50 division between the platform and token creators. According to the complaint, the platform processed more than $6 billion in cumulative trading volume. The defendants allegedly collected approximately $54 million in platform fees over the period covered by the lawsuit.

The price trajectory of the tokens tells the story in numbers. $PASTERNAK reached a market cap near $80 million before collapsing roughly 99.7 percent. $LAUNCHCOIN peaked at a market cap of $240 million in May 2025. As of April 14, 2026, the date of publication, the successor token $BELIEVE trades at approximately $0.001264 with a market cap between $1.6 million and $2.2 million, ranking around 3,004th by size on CoinMarketCap. The 24-hour trading volume sits near $727,000. These figures reflect live market data and will change after publication.

The lawsuit details specific alleged misrepresentations. On January 24, 2025, Pasternak posted on X that he had "0 ownership in the token," a statement plaintiffs say was designed to reassure buyers that no insider could sell into the market. From May through October 2025, as $LAUNCHCOIN fell more than 99 percent, Pasternak posted at least 12 times urging followers to "trust the process" in reference to a promised buyback mechanism that, according to the complaint, never executed. In October 2025, the platform migrated $LAUNCHCOIN to $BELIEVE, increasing the total token supply by 33.3 percent. The complaint alleges Pasternak described that increase publicly as 25 percent and that holders of unmigrated tokens had their positions effectively destroyed. Pasternak has not posted publicly on X since October 20, 2025. In November 2025, he announced an "Agentic Labs" AI startup on LinkedIn; those posts were later deleted. B24 Inc. and the Believe Foundation have not issued statements in response to the filing. Requests for comment to Pasternak were not acknowledged.

A separate line of allegations involves Kled, an AI company that split from Believe in July 2025. Kled CEO Avi Pastel disclosed publicly on December 16, 2025, that Pasternak had allegedly transferred the majority of his roughly 6 percent stake in KLED tokens to an undisclosed buyer through an over-the-counter transaction, without authorization, on September 25, 2025, the day after Kled launched its mobile app. That initial transfer was followed by further alleged sales that reduced Pasternak's stake to approximately 3.5 percent and then to approximately 1.7 percent, a pattern suggesting deliberate disposal rather than a single isolated transaction. Pastel wrote that Pasternak explained the sales were for "taxes," a justification Pastel said left the team without answers: "To this day, we do not know what this means." He added that his team "was forced into damage control, scrambling to coordinate OTC solutions to prevent further market harm," and concluded: "No builder should ever work with him again if that was not already clear."

The case sits within a broader enforcement moment. On March 30, 2026, the US Department of Justice unsealed indictments against ten executives from four crypto market-making firms: Gotbit, Vortex, Antier, and Contrarian. The charges covered coordinated wash trading and pump-and-dump schemes. The FBI ran a sting operation called Operation Token Mirrors, creating a fake token to identify services offering market manipulation for hire. Analysts and reporters covering the sector have described the action as the most aggressive federal enforcement push against crypto market manipulation to date.

The wider Solana memecoin ecosystem provides essential context. According to Solidus Labs, 98.6 percent of approximately 7 million tokens launched on the Pump.fun platform between January 2024 and March 2025 were identified as rug pulls or manipulative schemes. Fewer than 100,000 of those tokens maintained liquidity above $1,000. Losses attributed to rug pulls and scam collapses reached approximately $6 billion in the second quarter of 2025 alone. Believe operated within that same landscape.

The losses documented in Lee v. Pasternak are not confined to the US. $LAUNCHCOIN was listed on Binance India and CoinSwitch, India's largest retail crypto platform. Indian investors who bought near the peak face a structural disadvantage: India taxes crypto gains at a flat 30 percent rate with no mechanism to offset losses, and the country has no active crypto-specific class action framework comparable to the SDNY suit. The exposure in Sub-Saharan Africa is also significant. Nigeria ranks second globally for crypto transaction volumes, receiving $92.1 billion in on-chain value in the most recently tracked 12-month period, according to Chainalysis's 2025 Geography of Crypto report. Sub-Saharan Africa as a region saw 52 percent growth in crypto volumes to $205 billion in 2025. The share of sub-$10,000 retail-sized transactions in Sub-Saharan Africa is larger than in any other global region, according to that same report. Pierre Montmeas, the French co-plaintiff in Lee v. Pasternak, is one visible marker of how broadly the losses are distributed geographically. Whether investors in Nigeria, India, Kenya, or Pakistan can attach to a US class action remains legally uncertain and logistically difficult for most.

The lawsuit was filed 22 days before publication. Federal civil cases in the Southern District of New York do not typically advance to formal discovery within weeks of filing; the standard initial response period for defendants alone runs 21 days. Burwick Law, counsel for the plaintiffs, has issued no public comment beyond the filing itself.