He was once known as the 'next Zuckerberg,' but now he stands in the New York defendant's seat due to crypto fraud.
Written by: Nicky, Foresight News
On March 23, 2026, a lawsuit was filed in the Southern District of New York, 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 alleges that Pasternak engaged in deceptive business practices and false advertising through three consecutive token offerings and a forced migration, resulting in consumers suffering losses of hundreds of millions of dollars. At this point, it has been nearly half a year since he last posted original social media content.
The core of this lawsuit points to an application in the Solana ecosystem called Believe. Believe (formerly known as Clout.me) is a Solana social token issuance platform launched in 2025, founded by Pasternak. Users need only to tweet '@launchcoin+ token name' on the X platform to create tokens without coding, adopting a bonding curve mechanism, automatically upgrading to the Meteora liquidity pool once the market value reaches $100,000. The platform is positioned as an 'idea crowdfunding platform', and the platform token LAUNCHCOIN reached a peak market value of $370 million in May 2025.
According to the lawsuit, Pasternak launched the token named after himself, PASTERNAK, in January 2025, and publicly claimed that he 'had 0 ownership' of the token on the same day. This statement successfully shaped the trust narrative of 'no insider distribution', with the token's market value briefly reaching $80 million on its first day. However, within a week, the price plummeted by over 95%, leaving only about $190,000 in market value by March 2025.
On April 28, 2025, the platform was renamed from Clout to Believe; on May 2, the on-chain metadata for PASTERNAK was modified to LAUNCHCOIN, but the token contract itself was not redeployed. The lawsuit states that in mid-May, LAUNCHCOIN's market value once exceeded $240 million, reaching a historical high of $0.3647. After that, the price continued to decline, while Pasternak and Believe's official accounts publicly promised at least twelve times during this period to initiate a 'flywheel' buyback mechanism, using platform fee income to buy tokens on the open market to support the price.
On October 15, 2025, the Believe team announced that LAUNCHCOIN would be forcibly migrated to the new token BELIEVE. Holders must complete a 1:1 exchange by October 29, and tokens not migrated by the deadline will be permanently destroyed. Meanwhile, the total supply of the new token expanded from 1 billion to about 1.333 billion, an increase of 33.3%. The lawsuit details the allocation of the new tokens: about 17% allocated to current and future contributors, with a four-year vesting period and a one-year lockup; about 5% allocated to early investors with a one-year lockup; about 3% allocated to the foundation, with no lockup restrictions, available immediately. Original LAUNCHCOIN holders received no additional compensation, and their shareholding was directly diluted.
The lawsuit further points out that on the day he announced the migration, Pasternak publicly stated, 'No individuals or entities have received tokens for at least a year,' which is clearly contradicted by the fact that about 40 million tokens were instantly unlocked for the foundation. Furthermore, the Believe team described the increase in supply as '25%', while the actual mathematical calculation results in approximately 33%, which has sparked widespread skepticism and ridicule in the crypto community.
In terms of the platform's economic model, Believe charges about 2% in fees for each transaction, initially split evenly between the token creator and the platform, but adjusted after 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 the token launch can receive 0.1% of subsequent transaction fees. The lawsuit estimates that Believe has processed approximately $6 billion in transaction volume, generating total platform fee revenue of about $54 million. As the creator of PASTERNAK, LAUNCHCOIN, and BELIEVE, Pasternak continues to receive a share of the creator fees. The lawsuit also points out that during the week the migration announcement was made, on-chain data showed a significant amount of selling activity from top wallet addresses.
Pasternak's last original tweet was on October 16, 2025. In this long post, he admitted for the first time that he had never purchased any Solana tokens before launching his first token, reiterated that the team did not receive token allocations during the initial release, and clarified the misstatement regarding the increase in supply, promising that the foundation's holdings would not be sold and that the buyback flywheel would be initiated after the migration was completed.
On January 14, 2026, he retweeted a post from Believe's official account, which read: 'The concept of Believe v2 is simple: track everyone's real-time emotions.'
The updates from Believe's official account also stopped that day, with the last tweet announcing: 'New market launched: Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) is now open for trading.' After that, both Pasternak personally and the project's official accounts fell silent on social media.
Launched in January 2026, Believe v2 attempted to pivot to the 'emotional 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 date of the lawsuit, the market value of the BELIEVE token was about $1.2 million, evaporating nearly completely from its historical high.
This lawsuit cites New York General Business Law Sections 349 and 350, California's unfair competition law and false advertising law, while also raising common law claims of negligent misrepresentation and unjust enrichment. The plaintiff requests the court to order the defendants to compensate for actual damages, return platform and creator fees, and implement presumed trust and injunctive relief for traceable digital assets if necessary. Documents show that Pasternak resides in Manhattan, New York, and the registered address of B24, Inc., which he controls, is also in New York, with platform operation and development pointing to that jurisdiction. As of the time of publication, he has not publicly responded to the lawsuit or disclosed the specific amount he profited from the Believe project.
Legendary teenage years
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. He taught himself programming at the age of 13, and at 14, he collaborated with an engineer from Chicago during a school science class to complete an iOS game (Impossible Rush) in just a few hours, achieving millions of downloads and briefly reaching 16th place on the US App Store's overall chart. Media quickly captured this story, dubbing 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 seeking venture capital. In April of the same year, he founded a youth social shopping app called Flogg, raising about $2 million from firms like Binary Capital and Greylock Partners. Flogg's performance fell short of expectations and was shut down at the end of 2016. He immediately redirected resources to a new project called Monkey, a teen video chat application. Monkey accumulated over 20 million users and was acquired by the Chinese company Holla in 2018, becoming his first successfully sold startup during his teenage years.
Since 2018, Pasternak has turned to the food technology field, co-founding Simulate and launching plant-based chicken nuggets NUGGS. The project has received support from well-known investors such as Alexis Ohanian, Jay-Z, and McCain Foods, raising over $50 million in funding in 2021, with the company's valuation once exceeding $250 million. That same year, he was included in Forbes' '30 Under 30' list.
From mobile applications to food technology and then to Web3, Pasternak's every transformation has been on the cutting edge, accompanied by significant controversy and risk. As he became mired in legal troubles, his personal life also took a dramatic turn.
Since the second half of 2024, Pasternak has been in a public relationship with TikTok influencer Evelyn Ha. Evelyn comes from the influential Korean-American Ha family of three sisters on social media, and Pasternak frequently shares their luxurious interactions on social platforms. However, in early April 2026, netizens noticed that the Ha sisters simultaneously unfollowed him on Instagram, and Evelyn was later reported to be close to a Twitch streamer. This series of actions was widely interpreted as a signal of the end of their relationship, with some in the crypto community jokingly saying, 'Finally, I can reinvest my budget for buying Hermès into the flywheel.'
From a teenager writing apps in Sydney high school classrooms to an entrepreneur in the defendant's seat at the federal court in New York, Ben Pasternak, now 26, is facing a dual storm of legal and emotional challenges. He was once dubbed the 'next Zuckerberg' in the media, but now his name is more often associated with 'fraud', 'collapse', and 'unfollow'.