07-29-2025 
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A class action lawsuit in the United States against memecoin platform Pump.fun has been expanded to include Solana, Jito, and some of their top executives, including Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal.
The amended complaint, filed July 22 with the District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that Pump.fun, a platform for launching and trading memecoins on the Solana blockchain, amounted to a “coordinated racketeering enterprise designed to simulate the functions of a digital casino operated illegally under the guise of meme coin creation and trading.”
For this reason, the complaint is making a “RICO claim,” a form of complaint aimed at holding criminal organizations accountable. RICO comes from the ‘Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act’ of 1970, a U.S. federal law aimed to “combat organized crime and corruption.”
David Schwartz explains that “crucially, the RICO Act extends liability beyond the individuals who directly perpetrate the illegal act, to include those who own or manage organizations that are used to facilitate such activities.”
The complaint against Pump.fun was originally filed on January 30, 2025, with the initial defendants being cited as Baton Corporation Ltd., the United Kingdom-based company that owned and operated Pump.Fun and its co-founders, Alon Cohen, Dylan Kerler, and Noah Bernhard Hugo Tweedale.
In the amended suit, filed on Tuesday, the law firms behind the claim, Burwick Law and The Wolf Popper law firm, expanded the list of defendants to include all the participants and facilitators of the alleged racketeering enterprise.
Now the class action names Solana Foundation and Solana Labs (the entities behind the Solana blockchain network), co-founders Yakovenko and Gokal (the company’s CEO and COO, respectively), and Solana Foundation Executive Director Dan Albert, President Lily Liu, and former communications lead Austin Federa.
Also added to the list of defendants were Jito Labs, a software development firm that designs and operates transaction execution infrastructure for the Solana blockchain, as well as Jito CEO Lucas Bruder and COO Brian Smith.
“Together, Solana Labs, Jito Labs, and Pump.fun operate as a coordinated ecosystem in which Solana Labs supplies the infrastructure, Jito Labs controls transaction priority, and Pump.fun monetizes speculative token issuance,” claimed the filing. “At the center of this enterprise is Pump.fun, a platform presented to users as a fair and decentralized system for launching and trading meme coins on the Solana blockchain. In truth, Pump.fun is merely the front-facing slot machine cabinet, operated as part of a broader illegal gambling and money transmission scheme engineered and maintained jointly by Pump.fun, Jito Labs, Inc. (“Jito Labs”), Jito Foundation, Solana Labs, Inc. (“Solana Labs”), and the Solana Foundation.”
The filing claims that “at every level—from token design to fee extraction, to infrastructure maintenance and validator orchestration—Solana Labs and Jito Labs were knowing, intentional participants in the conduct at issue. They are not bystanders to fraud. They are its architects, beneficiaries, and co-conspirators.”The lead plaintiffs in the amended suit are Diego Aguilar, Kendall Carnahan, and Michael Okafor.
In a filing last month, Judge Colleen McMahon requested that an earlier class action brought against Pump.fun by Carnahan, an investor in the PNUT memecoin, be consolidated with the Diego Aguilar et al suit. McMahon reasoned that “both lawsuits are seeking the same relief for the same alleged violation,” and that both actions were filed by The Wolf Popper law firm, in conjunction with Burwick Law.
The accusations
Amongst the raft of accusations leveled at Pump.fun et al, the suit claims the platform’s operations are a “novel evolution in Ponzi and pump and dump schemes” and that it generated “$722.85 million from the illegal gambling enterprise.”
Another claim suggests that Pump.fun “minimized or omitted crucial investor protections, such as: Know Your Customer (KYC) verification; Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance; age verification requirements; and risk disclosures trading limits or other protective mechanisms.”
By neglecting these checks, argues the filing, Pump.Fun “exposes the public to severe risks of criminal exploitation—facilitating money laundering, terrorist financing, sex trafficking, and other serious crimes.”
One example of this relates to the North Korean hacking organization Lazarus Group, which the filing states used Pump.fun “to launder proceeds from what remains the largest known cryptocurrency theft in history: the theft of approximately $1.5 billion in digital assets from the Bybit exchange.”
On top of accusations of facilitating international cybercriminals, the suit claims Pump.fun “knowingly” facilitating the creation and promotion of “tokens that exploit hate speech, violence, and exploitation to generate attention and trading volume” and trademark violations.
A further accusation leveled at the platform is the offering and selling certain unregistered securities. However, since the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) clarified its view in February that memecoins “do not involve the offer and sale of securities under the federal securities laws,” it seems unlikely that this particular claim against the Pump.fun cohort will gain much traction.
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