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Revised lawsuit claims Chow’s group used widespread names to lure traders into Solana-based pump-and-dump schemes.
Benjamin Chow, a widely known crypto developer and co-founder of the Meteora decentralized trade on Solana, has been fingered because the driving pressure behind a plan to cheat traders by 15 totally different token schemes.
A revised model of a class-action lawsuit that was first filed in a New York federal court docket on April 21, 2025, says that Chow, Meteora, and Kelsier Ventures, a agency run by Hayden Davis and a few of his members of the family, used the names of well-known folks like U.S. First Girl Melania Trump and Argentine President Javier Milei to present credibility to coordinated scams meant to exploit cash from unwitting crypto traders.
Mechanics of the Alleged Scheme
The preliminary complaint accused Chow, Meteora, and members of the Davis household of mendacity to crypto traders. It stated they made cash on the expense of the general public by manipulating the worth of a Solana-based token referred to as M3M3, which had as a lot as 95% of its provide managed by a bunch of insiders.
The amended document now claims that fraud might have occurred with as many as 15 cryptocurrencies, together with the controversial MELANIA and LIBRA meme cash, which have been promoted by Mrs. Trump and President Milei, respectively. This info is claimed to have come from non-public messages shared by a whistleblower, wherein Davis allegedly admitted to finishing up “no less than fifteen token launches at Chow’s course.”
These suing say that Chow and the opposite defendants “borrowed credibility” from public figures and used them as “window dressing” to make their plans appear extra authentic. Because of this, they aren’t holding Melania or Milei accountable; as an alternative, they’re specializing in Meteora, its co-founder, and the Kelsier administration.
The brand new submitting claims that the alleged plot was carried out in a extremely organized manner, with every participant having a transparent position. Chow was supposedly accountable for the technical facet due to his “distinctive data of the code and the power to govern liquidity, charge routing, and provide controls.” As such, the complainants say it was attainable for him to manage the availability and costs of the brand new tokens, creating conditions the place their values may very well be artificially pushed up after which collapsed with out the data of abnormal merchants.
For the advertising facet, the lawsuit factors to Kelsier Ventures, the place Hayden, Charles, and Gideon Davis used paid influencers and social media campaigns to make it seem like there was actual public demand for meme cash like MELANIA and LIBRA. The group reportedly used the identical components for all 15 tokens: they created synthetic shortage, flooded the web with paid promotions, after which, when costs went up, the insiders offered all their holdings without delay, which made the asset’s worth drop and left different traders with big losses.
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A Sample of Denial and Mounting Proof
In response to the lawsuit, after the LIBRA token crashed in February 2025, Meteora pretended to blacklist Kelsier, a transfer the plaintiffs referred to as “performative.” Chow and members of the Meteora management are stated to have made sworn declarations describing themselves as “passive builders of autonomous software program,” suggesting that they had nothing to do with the worth behaviors of the crypto belongings in query.
The programmer quit Meteora in February, nonetheless insisting on his innocence, however information from blockchain evaluation firms like Bubblemaps inform a unique story. Their report from February 17, 2025, adopted pockets addresses that clearly showed monetary ties between those that made MELANIA and LIBRA, whereas revealing that insiders made greater than $100 million in earnings.
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