Ben Pasternak, the 26-year-old Australian entrepreneur behind Solana-based social token platform Believe, was arrested this week on criminal charges in New York. The news arrives on top of an already active civil fraud lawsuit and sends the platform’s native token to fresh lows.
Court records from the New York Criminal Court show Pasternak was taken into custody on Tuesday over a physical altercation that allegedly took place on March 31.
Pasternak now faces one count of second-degree strangulation and two counts of third-degree assault, the latter carrying the specific allegation of intentional physical injury. He has entered a not guilty plea and is due back in court on June 11.
No law enforcement agency has issued a public statement on the matter, and the identity of the other party involved has not been disclosed in available records.
What’s also unclear is whether the criminal arrest has any connection to the separate civil case already filed against him. The two proceedings appear legally distinct, one involves an alleged physical act, the other alleged financial misconduct. But the timing ensures they are being talked about together.
A platform that moved fast and left investors behind
Believe, originally launched as Clout in early 2025, was designed for maximum accessibility. Built on the Solana blockchain, it gave anyone the ability to create and trade crypto tokens without writing a single line of code, without setting up a crypto wallet, and without prior experience. Users could even pay by credit card.
Launching a token was as simple as tagging Believe’s X account in a post. A pricing mechanism called a bonding curve, which adjusts a token’s price automatically as more people buy or sell, would move successful tokens into a broader liquidity pool once they crossed a $100,000 market cap threshold.
The platform gained traction quickly. Before crypto, Pasternak had already earned a Forbes 30 Under 30 recognition for his plant-based food company, and he carried that profile into Believe. At its height, the platform’s primary token reached a market cap north of $240 million.
But according to a civil class action filed in March, the entire arc of the platform was built on a foundation that didn’t hold up.
When Pasternak first launched a token bearing his own name in January 2025, he told his audience publicly that he held no ownership stake in it whatsoever. The lawsuit, filed by law firm Burwick Law on behalf of investors, alleges that claim was never true, and that it was made deliberately to convince ordinary buyers there was no insider advantage at play.
That framing, the complaint argues, helped push the token’s market cap to around $80 million within days of launch.
Over the following months, as the Believe platform’s token, by then rebranded as LAUNCHCOIN, steadily lost value, Pasternak repeatedly told his audience that a buyback program was coming.
The mechanism he described, which he called a “flywheel”, was meant to take a share of the fees the platform collected from every transaction and use that money to purchase tokens on the open market, theoretically putting a floor under the price. He made at least 12 separate public commitments to this effect between May and October 2025. None of them were honored, according to the complaint.
Then in October, instead of delivering the buyback, Pasternak announced that LAUNCHCOIN would be retired entirely and replaced with a new token called BELIEVE. The switch was mandatory, with a two-week window to complete it.
The migration created 333 million new tokens distributed to insiders, shrinking existing holders’ stakes by roughly one third. Anyone who missed the deadline had their holdings wiped out entirely.
After the migration closed, Pasternak went quiet. No updates, no explanation for investors who had watched their holdings collapse.
The official Believe account on X went dark in mid-January 2026, and Pasternak himself had not posted an original message since October 2025. He briefly resurfaced to tease something called Believe v2 without addressing the losses that had already accumulated.
The lawsuit and what it alleges
Burwick Law filed the class action on March 23, 2026, in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, representing investors who held any of the three tokens, $PASTERNAK, $LAUNCHCOIN or $BELIEVE, at any point from January 2025 onward. The defendants named are Pasternak personally, his company B24 Inc., and the Believe Foundation.
The core of the complaint is that this was not one bad outcome but a repeating pattern. The lawsuit describes Pasternak running the same playbook across three separate token names: build excitement, attract buyers, collect fees, then let the price fall. Each cycle allegedly generated revenue for him and his entities even as retail investors absorbed the losses.
The platform is estimated to have handled over $6 billion in total trading volume and collected around $54 million in fees across its lifespan. Investor losses from the token collapses are alleged to run into the hundreds of millions. The case is in early stages, no class has been certified yet and no decisions have been issued.
As of this week, the BELIEVE token has fallen 99.8 percent from its May 2025 peak. It is now trading at $0.0007767 and dropped another 30 percent in the 24 hours following news of Pasternak’s arrest.
The criminal charges are unconnected to the civil lawsuit, strangulation and assault are a different matter entirely from securities fraud.
But the optics of a founder facing both at once, while his platform’s token sits over 90 percent below its peak and investors wait for a court to hear their case, are about as bad as it gets in crypto.