From "Flywheel" to "Scythe": 26-Year-Old Believe Founder Faces Criminal Charges for Crypto Fraud

Original Author: Nicky, Foresight News

On March 23, 2026, a lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, formally naming 26-year-old Australian entrepreneur Ben Pasternak and his entities, B24, Inc. and the 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 launches and one forced migration, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for consumers. By this point, nearly half a year had passed since his last original social media post.

The core of this lawsuit points to a Solana-based application called Believe. Believe (formerly Clout.me) is a Solana social token launch platform launched in 2025, founded by Pasternak. Users could create tokens without code simply by posting a tweet on X with the format "@launchcoin + token name." It employed a bonding curve mechanism, automatically upgrading to a Meteora liquidity pool once the market cap reached $100,000. Positioned as an "idea crowdfunding platform," 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 "0 ownership" of the token. This statement successfully crafted a trust narrative of "no insider allocation," with the token's market cap briefly touching $80 million on its first day. However, within a week, the price plummeted by over 95%, leaving a market cap of only about $190,000 by March 2025.

On April 28, 2025, the platform was rebranded 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 notes that in mid-May, LAUNCHCOIN's market cap once exceeded $240 million, hitting an all-time high of $0.3647. Subsequently, the price continued to decline, 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 a forced migration of LAUNCHCOIN to a new token, BELIEVE. Holders had to complete a 1:1 swap by October 29; tokens not migrated by the deadline would be permanently burned.

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 newly minted tokens: about 17% allocated to current and future contributors, subject to a four-year vesting schedule with a one-year lock-up; about 5% allocated to early investors, locked for one year; and about 3% allocated to the foundation, with no lock-up restrictions, making them immediately available.

Original LAUNCHCOIN holders received no additional compensation, and their ownership stake was directly diluted.

The complaint further alleges that on the day the migration was announced, Pasternak publicly stated that "no individual or entity will receive tokens for at least a year," a claim clearly contradicted by the fact that approximately 40 million tokens for the foundation were unlocked immediately. Additionally, while the Believe team described the supply increase as "25%," the actual mathematical calculation was approximately 33%, a discrepancy that sparked widespread skepticism and mockery within the crypto community.

Regarding the platform's economic model, Believe charged approximately a 2% fee on each transaction. Initially split evenly between the token creator and the platform, this was adjusted in June 2025 to 70% for the creator and 30% for the platform. The platform also featured a "scout" mechanism, where the first user to trigger a token's launch would receive 0.1% of subsequent transaction fees. The complaint estimates that Believe processed approximately $6 billion in trading volume, generating total platform fee revenue of around $54 million.

As the creator of PASTERNAK, LAUNCHCOIN, and BELIEVE, Pasternak himself continuously received a share of the creator fees. The complaint also points out 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 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 launch, clarified the misstatement regarding the supply increase, and promised that the foundation's holdings would not be sold, with the buyback flywheel to be activated 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 ceased on that day, with its final tweet announcing: "New market live: Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) is now open for trading." Since then, both Pasternak's personal and the project's official social media accounts have fallen 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 lawsuit filing date, the BELIEVE token's market cap was approximately $1.2 million, having evaporated from its all-time high.

This lawsuit cites New York 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 plaintiffs request the court to order the defendants to compensate for actual damages, return platform and creator fees, and, if 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 publication, he has not publicly responded to the lawsuit nor disclosed the specific amount of personal profit he gained from the Believe project.

A Legendary Teenage Era

Prior to this legal storm, Pasternak's life story 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. In 2014, at 14 years old, he collaborated with an engineer from Chicago during a school science class to create the iOS game "Impossible Rush" in a matter of hours. It garnered millions of downloads and briefly reached #16 on the US App Store's 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 approximately $2 million from firms like Binary Capital and Greylock Partners.

Flogg underperformed and shut down by the end of 2016. He then redirected resources to a new project, Monkey, a video chat app for teens.

Monkey amassed over 20 million users and was acquired by the Chinese company Holla in 2018, marking his first successful startup sale during his teenage years.

Starting in 2018, Pasternak pivoted to the food tech sector, co-founding Simulate and launching the plant-based chicken nugget brand NUGGS. The project attracted backing from notable investors like Alexis Ohanian, Jay-Z, and McCain Foods, raising over $50 million in 2021 with a company valuation once exceeding $250 million. That same year, he was named to Forbes' "30 Under 30" list.

From mobile apps to food tech, and then to Web3, Pasternak's every pivot landed on a trending wave, accompanied by significant controversy and risk. As he became mired in legal troubles, his personal life also took a dramatic turn.

Starting in the second half of 2024, Pasternak was publicly in a relationship with TikTok influencer Evelyn Ha. Evelyn is part of the influential Korean-American Ha sisters trio on social media, and Pasternak frequently shared their luxurious interactions on social platforms.

However, in early April 2026, netizens noticed that all three Ha sisters had unfollowed him on Instagram simultaneously. Evelyn was later revealed to be close with a Twitch streamer. The outside world widely interpreted this series of actions as signaling the end of their relationship, with some in the crypto community quipping, "Finally, the budget for buying Hermès can be reinvested into the flywheel."

From the teenager coding apps in a Sydney high school classroom to the entrepreneur now facing charges in a New York federal court, Ben Pasternak's 26th year has brought both legal and emotional storms. Once hailed by the media as the "next Zuckerberg," his name is now more frequently associated with "fraud," "collapse," and "unfollowed."

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