Investors claim $69M loss in lawsuit against Meteora and Kelsier Labs

A class-action lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York accuses decentralised exchange Meteora, venture capital firm Kelsier Labs, and several executives of fraud related to the launch of the M3M3 (CRYPTO:M3M3) token.

According to the amended complaint submitted on April 21, investors allege that Meteora and Kelsier Labs “intentionally misrepresented” the M3M3 token’s launch in December 2024, resulting in at least $69 million in losses between December 2024 and February 2025.

The plaintiffs claim that the defendants presented themselves as “trusted leaders in the Solana ecosystem” to gain investor confidence, but instead orchestrated a scheme that manipulated token sales and artificially inflated the price.

“This artificially-inflated valuation communicated highly misleading information to non-insider investors, who reasonably relied on Defendants’ representations that the $M3M3 launch was fully accessible to the public and conducted in a transparent manner fair to non-insider investors, and thus reasonably relied on $M3M3 market price as a meaningful measure of its value,” the lawsuit states.

“Together, Defendants designed the $M3M3 Token and planned its launch on Meteora in a manner intended to illicitly enrich themselves at the expense of the unsuspecting investing public,” the complaint further alleges.

Meteora has been linked to the launch of several controversial tokens, including those for Trump, Melania, and Libra, and has faced similar legal challenges over previous token launches.

The case is part of a broader trend of legal scrutiny facing crypto projects accused of misleading investors or violating securities laws, even as the US Securities and Exchange Commission has reduced some enforcement actions in the sector.