Solana-based decentralized exchange Meteora is now the focus of a class-action lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, as investors accuse the platform’s leadership and partners of engineering a deceptive launch of its $M3M3 token.
The lawsuit alleges that Meteora’s CEO, Benjamin Chow, venture firm Kelsier Labs, and executives Hayden, Gideon, and Charles Thomas Davis conspired to manipulate the market and mislead the public about the token’s offering. According to the plaintiffs, insiders secretly amassed up to 95% of the $M3M3 token supply by distributing it across over 150 wallets.
This internal accumulation was allegedly followed by a restricted trading window that barred public participation, allowing the insiders to inflate the token’s price through coordinated trades. Once the price spiked, the group reportedly dumped their holdings, triggering a swift market crash just days after launch. Plaintiffs say the project was promoted as a safeguard against typical meme coin scams, with Chow marketing $M3M3 as a stake-based token offering transparency, community ownership, and rewards sourced from transaction fees on Meteora’s platform. Investors now argue that these assurances were intentionally misleading.
The complaint alleges over $69 million in investor losses following the token’s launch on December 4, which saw its value plummet two days later due to an alleged insider selloff. In response to the backlash, the team attempted to boost the token’s price, but these efforts failed to stabilize its value. The lawsuit also accuses the defendants of hiding their identities and affiliations during the launch to create a false impression of a decentralized, community-driven initiative.
This is not the first time Meteora and Kelsier Labs have been implicated in such incidents. The same parties were previously linked to the collapse of the LIBRA token, where insiders were accused of using private liquidity mechanisms to exit with profits at the expense of unsuspecting traders. A similar pattern was also seen in the ill-fated MELANIA meme coin project.
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