Founder of Solana Token Launchpad Believe Arrested on Assault, Strangulation Charges

In short

Prosecutors charged Benjamin Pasternak with strangulation and assault over a March 31 incident.
Pasternak was arraigned and pleaded not responsible; his subsequent court docket date is in June.
The arrest provides to mounting authorized troubles over allegedly misleading token gross sales.

Benjamin Pasternak, founding father of the Solana-based token launchpad Imagine, was arrested Tuesday and charged with one depend of second-degree strangulation and two counts of third-degree assault with intent to trigger bodily damage over a March 31 incident.

Pasternak has pleaded not responsible and is scheduled to return to court docket June 11, per court docket information within the New York State Unified Courtroom System.

The arrest comes as Pasternak faces civil allegations, as properly. A class motion lawsuit filed March 23 within the Southern District of New York alleges Pasternak claimed “zero possession” within the Imagine platform’s tokens whereas ostensibly accumulating creator charges on each commerce, reneging on at the very least 12 public buyback guarantees and executing a token migration that allegedly diluted holders by about 33%.

The criticism alleges Pasternak “ran the identical play 3 times, underneath three completely different token names” throughout $PASTERNAK, $LAUNCHCOIN, and $BELIEVE, because the Imagine platform processed roughly $6 billion in buying and selling quantity and extracted an estimated $54 million in charges.

Holders who didn’t convert their tokens by the October 29, 2025 migration deadline noticed their balances completely destroyed, per the submitting, which estimates shopper losses within the lots of of tens of millions of {dollars}.

The go well with brings six claims spanning New York shopper safety regulation, California false promoting statutes, and customary regulation theories. Plaintiffs additionally search an injunction freezing on-chain property, together with the flywheel pockets and token treasury.

Pasternak co-founded plant-based meals firm Simulate in early 2018, elevating $50 million in a Sequence B spherical at a $260 million valuation earlier than promoting the corporate in October 2024. He launched his first crypto token the next January.

Late final yr, Avi Patel, founding father of decentralized information market Kled, accused Pasternak of dumping KLED tokens on the open market in breach of a personal OTC-only settlement.

Patel alleged that Pasternak offered greater than 1% of the KLED provide throughout the mission’s September app launch, then resumed promoting throughout a later replace. The Kled group repurchased Pasternak’s place twice over-the-counter, lowering his stake within the mission from 6% to 1.7%.

The Imagine platform’s native token has crashed 99.8% since its Could 2025 all-time excessive at $0.35, and has fallen practically 15% on the day to a current value of $0.0007, per CoinGecko information.

Burwick Legislation, counsel for the plaintiffs, didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark. Decrypt reached out to Imagine for remark however didn’t instantly obtain a response.