Pasternak’s Arrest is the Final Nail in Coffin for BelieveApp

For a brief window of time, BelieveApp, or Launchcoin as it was then called, was the kind of overnight financial sensation that only crypto can provide.

At its peak, BelieveApp was generating over $4M per day. Today, founder Ben Pasternak is one of Solana’s least-favorite founders, and finds himself facing a slew of legal charges.

Does anyone still believe in $BELIEVE?

The Rise and Fall of Believe

In early 2025, Pasternak made his onchain debut with Clout, an app enabling anyone to launch a ‘social-token’ tied to internet personalities. ‘Creators coins’ was hardly a revolutionary idea at the time, but launching a token via tweeting was a novel mechanic and set the stage for a more compelling evolution.

In April 2025, Clout rebranded to Believe. Taking the same tweet-to-launch model, Believe applied to mechanic to startups, promising to help emerging founders raise capital for their businesses with nothing more than a tweet.

Believe’s pivot came at a time when permissionless venture funding was front and center of the onchain economy. The promise of Internet Capital Markets brought a wide variety of startup builders to Solana, with certain teams like Kled AI going on to raise $9M in funding.

Believe exploded overnight, becoming one of Solana’s breakout applications that reached an audience beyond the average crypto-native. At its peak, Believe generated over $4M per day. Traders poured funds into the platform’s native token, $LAUNCHCOIN, sending the asset to a market capitalization of over $300M.

However, as is often the case in the onchain economy, BelieveApp didn’t have a lot of staying power. After a frenetic few days, BelieveApp struggled to maintain any meaningful momentum, causing revenue to evaporate in a matter of weeks and sending $LAUNCHCOIN crashing down as abruptly as it had risen.

With floundering activity and frustrated holder base, things went from bad to worse for Pasternak and Believe. Pasternak failed to deliver the flywheel-based value accrual mechanism he’d promised token holders, and all but abandoned ongoing protocol development.

In October, Believe announced it would be migrating from the $LAUNCHCOIN ticker to a new token, $BELIEVE. While aligning the brand and the asset, the migration came with a 33% token supply increase, with the majority newly minted tokens going to “current and future contributors, early investors, and foundation initiatives”.

 

In December, Kled AI Avi Patel revealed that Pasternak had received an allocation in every token launched on Believe, claiming half of all fees and programmatically building an outsized holding in all coins.

Patel decried Pasternak’s consequent behavior, accusing the Believe founder of lying about his trading activities, backing out of OTC deals, and liquidating tokens he’s promised not to sell. 

By this stage, Pasternak and the Believe launchpad had lost all credibility and goodwill within Solana, prompting ecosystem teams like Meteora to develop toolings to help founders migrate their tokens away from the platform. 

Charges Against Pasternak Stack Up

Several months later, Pasternak now finds himself on the receiving end of several lawsuits and criminal charges.

In March 2026, Burwick Law filed a class-action lawsuit against Ben Pasternak, B24 Inc., and Believe Foundation on behalf of tokenholders. 

The lawsuit alleges that Pasternak claimed he had “0 ownership in the token”, failed to honor promises of the fabled “flywheel”, and lying about Believe Foundation token emissions. 

Just one month later, Pasternak now faces criminal charges for violent conduct.

No one in Solana has believed in BelieveApp for a long time, but the emerging charges and outstanding lawsuits against Ben Pasternak have only added to the platform’s damaged reputation.

$BELIEVE now trades 99.8% down from its all-time highs.

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