Based in New York, Burwick Law Firm filed a lawsuit yesterday in the Southern District of New York Federal Court, accusing Pump.fun and its series of Solana ecosystem partners of illegally operating a "digital casino" without regulatory approval, using meme coin speculation to embezzle up to $5.5 billion from retail investors.
The defendants include Pump.fun, Solana Labs, Solana Foundation, Jito Labs, Jito Foundation, and several core executives, including Solana co-founders Anatoly Yakovenko, Raj Gokal, and Solana Foundation chair Lily Liu among others.
The plaintiff claims that Pump.fun was packaged as a "decentralized, fair" meme coin issuance and trading platform, but in reality, it was a "slot machine-style front" with a larger scale illegal gambling and fund transfer scheme behind it.
"This is not financial freedom, this is a systematically manipulated casino," the plaintiff's lawyer wrote in the complaint.
The lawsuit is based on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), arguing that it is an organized, cross-institutional crypto scam that uses anonymous issuance and high volatility trading mechanisms to create a "zero-sum game" environment, causing most users to suffer significant losses without equivalent information.
According to blockchain data analysis, the estimated losses of users on Pump.fun and its associated platforms range from $4 billion to $5.5 billion, and this mechanism is described by the plaintiff as "an extremely unfair systemic financial trap for ordinary users."
Meanwhile, affected by the lawsuit news, Pump.fun's platform token PUMP plummeted more than 22% in the past 24 hours, and the price of Solana (SOL) also fell nearly 2.5%.
This is not the first time Burwick Law has initiated a class action lawsuit related to cryptocurrencies. Earlier this year, the firm also sued promoters and platforms involved in the "Peanut Squirrel (PNUT)" meme coin crash, and represented investors in legal actions in the "Hawk Tuah" and "Libra Token" cases, forming a continuous legal offensive against unregulated operations in the crypto industry.
This lawsuit has become the largest RICO case in the crypto circle so far, marking the beginning of stricter scrutiny and crackdown by regulatory and legal forces on the structural issues behind "decentralized casinos."
