Avi Patel@avipat_
A Message Regarding Ben Pasternak
I didn’t want to make this post. The only thing I wanted was to never think about or speak about this person ever again.
But for the last 7 days straight, Ben Pasternak has been market selling millions of $KLED tokens via DCA (every second of the day), directly during our largest app update to date + bear market volume. For the transparency of our holders, I believe it is responsible to tell the full story.
Ben originally owned over 6% of the $KLED supply as part of his original fee agreement. This allocation continued aggregating until we exited Believe in July.
Shortly after, Ben and I had a Telegram conversation where he explicitly stated he would never sell $KLED on the open market, and that if liquidity was ever needed, he was open to either OTC sales or burning supply.
After that conversation, things were calm. We fully intended to coordinate OTC buyers whenever needed.
On September 24th, the day before our mobile app release, I sent both Imran and Ben an early trailer of the launch as a gesture of goodwill despite prior issues. They congratulated us and we moved on.
The next day, September 25th, our whales noticed a significant sell off coming from Ben’s public wallet. Ben later claimed he had “OTC’d” his supply to an undisclosed third party, who then immediately market sold over 1% of the total $KLED supply that same day. To this day, he has refused to disclose who this party was.
I immediately reached out to Ben, Soju, Imran, and others. Both Imran and Soju, to my knowledge, told Ben this was unacceptable and that we should have been informed. His reasoning for selling was “taxes.” To this day, we do not know what this means, especially considering that burning the supply would have solved this issue as well.
So during our biggest product launch, we were forced into damage control, scrambling to coordinate OTC solutions to prevent further market harm.
Between September 24th and September 27th, Ben agreed to and backed out of OTC pricing four separate times, while also lying about when he began selling. Communication was nearly nonexistent. Even his own team struggled to get responses.
Ultimately, we were forced to OTC his position at an approximately $27 million valuation. This reduced his holdings from around 6% to roughly 3.5%, as far as I remember, possibly slightly more or less. He refused to sell the remainder, stating he wanted to “wait it out,” despite previously claiming his selling was for tax reasons.
Weeks passed with zero communication.
Then, about a week ago, Ben resumed market selling $KLED again, despite repeated assurances that he would never do so.
Once again, our whales had to scramble to organize OTC buys, reducing his position to roughly 1.7%. Even then, he continued selling into the chart.
As of now, Ben holds approximately 2 to 3 million tokens as far as I know and is still market selling them. It is almost over.
That is the full story. I will not engage further, regardless of any response from him or his team. All communications are documented and have been seen by hundreds of people.
This behavior is unacceptable. No builder should ever work with him again if that was not already clear.
On to better things. Thankfully, this chapter is almost closed, and I can move on from the Believe team’s clown show.
