Odaily News DefiTuna founder Moty publicly announced yesterday through X that DefiTuna has refunded and severed all ties with Kelsier. Kelsier contributed $30,000 to the project on January 16, 2025. Afterwards, Moty revealed the following information in a series of posts:
-Kelsier participated in a structured scheme to extract huge amounts of money from the issuance of Meme coins on M3M3;
-Meteora’s leadership (including Ben) facilitated a network of influencers who made huge profits at the expense of the community;
- Despite being contacted directly, Meteora's core contributors took little to no responsibility;
-Meteora co-founder Ben said he would resign after being questioned, but issued a vague public response.
“I personally went the extra mile, risking myself and everything we had built at DefiTuna, to try to get key people to come forward and name the bad actors to try to remove them,” Moty said.
Moty detailed DefiTuna’s interaction with Kelsier, revealing that Kelsier approached them through a Lebanon-based employee named Thomas to assist in providing liquidity to M3M3, which was initially an independent platform but was later revealed to have been taken ownership by Ben.
Kelsier’s participation requires projects launched on M3M3 to allocate a certain percentage of the token supply to them. DefiTuna co-founder Vlad participated passively and believed that their cooperation was legal.
Moty shared that Kelsier personally asked them to provide liquidity for M3M3, and Ben prohibited any trading outside of Meteora. When DefiTuna proposed a neutral liquidity allocation strategy, it was ignored. Moty also shared multiple screenshots highlighting manipulative market making behavior.
Moty said that more than $200 million was siphoned from multiple projects, including AIAI, MATES, ENRON, Melania, and Libra. Hayden Davis shared the minting addresses of these tokens with a group of KOLs before the tokens were officially released, allowing them to pre-order and profit from them. (SolanaFloor)