Benjamin Pasternak, the founder of Solana-based memecoin launchpad Believe, has been arrested and is facing second-degree strangulation and assault charges. The news was first reported by WuBlockchain on April 22, 2026.
At the time of writing, no formal charging document or law enforcement press release has been circulated publicly beyond the WuBlockchain post. The charges listed, second-degree strangulation and assault, are serious felony-class offenses in most US state codes, but the jurisdiction handling the case has not yet been independently confirmed.
Who Benjamin Pasternak Is
Pasternak built a profile well before Believe. As a teenager he shipped the viral iOS game Impossible Rush, and later became a frequent name in the New York startup scene as a serial founder. Believe is his most recent venture, positioned as an internet-capital-markets launchpad on Solana where users can create and trade tokens tied to ideas, brands, and internet personalities.
Believe gained traction during the 2025 memecoin cycle by letting non-technical creators deploy tokens without writing code. The platform has been one of the more visible ICM experiments on Solana, alongside pump.fun and other launchpad products.
Why Founder Risk Matters for a Launchpad
Launchpad platforms sit at a sensitive point in the memecoin stack. They hold user deposits while tokens are being created and routed through bonding curves, and their admin keys control fee collection, treasury wallets, and in some cases creator payouts. A sudden leadership absence, whether from legal trouble, resignation, or anything else, is a material operational event for any team that has not pushed those functions on-chain or to a multisig.
Solana founder Anatoly Yakovenko posted on April 22 that teams holding admin keys should consider automated monitoring of those keys, calling the concept "pretty neat to watch." The timing is coincidental, but it lands on the same pressure point: if one person's availability determines whether a protocol can pause, upgrade, or respond to incidents, that is concentration risk before it is anything else.
Believe has not issued a public statement on Pasternak's status at the time of publication. Traders in Believe-adjacent tokens will want to watch three things: the platform's fee wallet, any governance or admin transactions signed from Pasternak-controlled addresses, and whether the team confirms who else holds signing authority.
Trading Reaction
Market impact on the broader Solana ecosystem has been limited. Solana is trading around $86.93 as of April 23, up 1.1% over 24 hours. The story is reputational rather than systemic, and nothing in the reporting so far points to user funds on Believe being affected.
That can still change. Tokens launched through Believe often trade on low liquidity, and news like this tends to hit creator and community tokens harder than the platform's own metrics suggest. Anyone holding Believe-launched assets should check whether the token contract has migrated away from any launchpad-controlled role, or whether Believe still has fee or upgrade permissions over it.
Reporting Caveats
Two things are worth flagging for readers:
First, the primary source here is a news aggregator post. WuBlockchain has a track record of surfacing crypto-adjacent legal news quickly, but the underlying court filing, booking record, or police statement has not yet been attached to the report. Details about exact charges, bail status, and jurisdiction can shift as more primary documents surface.
Second, these are charges, not a conviction. Second-degree strangulation and assault are accusations that will move through a criminal process. We will update the article if a charging document, arraignment record, or statement from Pasternak's counsel becomes public.
For readers active on Believe or holding tokens launched through it, the practical question is operational: who at the company can sign transactions, pause contracts, or respond to a security event while this plays out. That is the answer that actually matters for user funds, and it is the one the Believe team has not yet given.
Overview
Believe founder Benjamin Pasternak has been arrested and charged with second-degree strangulation and assault, according to reporting from WuBlockchain on April 22, 2026. No primary charging documents have been released publicly yet. Believe has not commented. The immediate crypto question is whether the launchpad's admin and fee functions are distributed beyond Pasternak, and how that is communicated to users holding tokens created through the platform.
