Breaking! Former "Zuckerberg Second" confirmed crypto scam, $BELIEVE market cap evaporates by 99.9%, hundreds of millions of dollars of retail investors buried alive

On March 23, 2026, the Southern District of New York Federal Court received a class-action lawsuit document. The 26-year-old Australian entrepreneur Ben Pasternak, along with his controlled B24 company and Believe Foundation, officially became defendants. Plaintiffs Joshua Lee and Pierre Montemas accused Pasternak of engaging in deceptive business practices through a series of token issuances and forced migrations.

At the core of this legal storm is a social token issuance platform based on $SOL called Believe. The platform’s predecessor was Clout.me, where users could create tokens without coding by posting tweets in a specific format on the X platform. Its platform token, $LAUNCHCOIN, reached a market cap of $370 million in May 2025.

The complaint outlines the suspected fraud pathway in detail. In January 2025, Pasternak launched a token named after himself, $PASTERNAK, and publicly claimed to have “0 ownership” of the token to build trust. The token’s market cap soared to $80 million on its first day but plummeted over 95% within a week, leaving a market cap of about $190k by March.

In April 2025, the platform was renamed Believe. In early May, the on-chain metadata of $PASTERNAK was changed to $LAUNCHCOIN, but the contract itself remained unchanged. By mid-May, $LAUNCHCOIN’s market cap temporarily exceeded $240 million. During this period, Pasternak and official accounts at least twelve times promised to use platform fee income to initiate a “flywheel” buyback to support the token price.

A key turning point occurred on October 15, 2025. The team announced that $LAUNCHCOIN would be forcibly migrated to a new token, $BELIEVE, with holders required to complete a 1:1 exchange within two weeks, or their tokens would become invalid. Meanwhile, the total supply of the new token expanded from 1 billion to approximately 190k, an increase of 33.3%.

The distribution plan for the new tokens was approximately 17% to contributors with lock-up; about 5% to early investors, locked for one year; about 3% to the foundation, unlocked immediately and available for use. The existing holders’ shares were directly diluted. The complaint states that Pasternak claimed on the day of the migration that “no individual or entity will receive tokens for at least a year,” which contradicts the fact that 40 million tokens held by the foundation were unlocked immediately.

The platform’s economic model charges about 2% fee on each transaction. The complaint estimates that Believe processed approximately $6 billion in total transaction volume, with total platform fee income around $54 million. As the creator of multiple tokens, Pasternak continued to earn from creator fees.

During the week of the migration announcement, on-chain data showed large sell-offs from top wallet addresses. Pasternak’s last original tweet was on October 16, 2025, where he admitted that he had never bought any $SOL tokens before launching his first token and clarified a misstatement about supply increase.

Since then, he and the project’s official social media went silent. Believe v2, launched in January 2026, attempted to shift toward a “sentiment market,” but failed to generate much interest. As of the date of the lawsuit, $BELIEVE’s market cap was only about $1.2 million, evaporating from its peak.

The plaintiffs filed the lawsuit under New York and California laws, seeking damages, restitution, and the imposition of a trust and injunctive relief on related assets. The documents show that Pasternak resides in Manhattan, New York, and his company is also registered there. He has not publicly responded to the allegations.

Prior to this lawsuit, Pasternak’s life was marked by youthful success. Born in Sydney in 1999, he taught himself programming at 13, and at 14, a game he developed ranked 16th on the US App Store’s top charts, earning media praise as “the next Zuckerberg.”

At 15, he dropped out of school to start a business in New York, involved in social shopping apps and the video chat app Monkey, which was later sold successfully. In 2018, he shifted to food tech, founding plant-based chicken nugget company Simulate, which gained support from well-known investors and was valued at over $250 million, making the Forbes “30 Under 30” list.

From mobile apps and food tech to Web3, each transition was at the forefront of trends but also controversial. Now, embroiled in litigation, his personal life has also taken a turn. After publicly dating influencer Evelyn H in late 2024, her family unfollowed him on social media in early April 2026, suggesting the relationship had ended.

From a programming prodigy in Sydney classrooms to a defendant in New York, Ben Pasternak’s 26 years have brought a legal and emotional storm.