Meteora Co-Founder Ben Chow Resigns Amid the Scandal Surrounding the $LIBRA Token

Meow, the pseudonymous founder of Solana decentralized exchange (DEX) Jupiter, announced on Monday that Chow resigned amid the controversy.

Ben Chow, co-founder of Solana-based decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol Meteora, has stepped down from his role amid the controversy surrounding the $LIBRA token.

Meow, the pseudonymous founder of Solana decentralized exchange (DEX) Jupiter, announced Chow's resignation on Monday.

“While I am 100% confident about Ben’s character, as a project lead he has also shown a lack of judgement and care about some of the core aspects of the project,” Meow tweeted.

Chow's decision comes as Meteora faces scrutiny over its involvement with the token, which experienced a meteoric rise and collapse following an endorsement and subsequent distancing from Argentina’s President Javier Milei.

In a recent interview, Milei stated that he shared information about $LIBRA in good faith, believing it could benefit Argentine entrepreneurs.

“I shared this the same way I’ve shared hundreds of things,” he explained, emphasizing that his message was one of disseminating information not endorsement.

Milei acknowledged the fallout as a "slap in the face" and a learning experience but downplayed the impact on Argentine investors while claiming that the majority of those affected were from the U.S. and China.

Milei’s connection to $LIBRA stems from his meetings with Hayden Davis, CEO of Kelsier Ventures, the market maker behind the token. According to reports, Davis met with Milei at least ten times since October 2024.

Davis then admitted in a video interview with YouTuber Coffeezilla that the Libra team had engaged in “sniping” and revealed that his team bought $LIBRA and $MELANIA tokens immediately after launching them.

The $LIBRA team had created liquidity pools for the token on Meteora, linking it to the platform at the center of the scandal. Chow denied any involvement.

“For $LIBRA, although we were made aware of the possibility of it several weeks ago by Hayden, we had no involvement in the project at all beyond providing IT support,” he stated in a post on X. “Neither I nor the Meteora team compromised the $LIBRA launch by leaking information, nor did we purchase, receive, or manage any tokens.”

However, Chow later acknowledged that he had referred Davis to other projects looking to launch memecoins.

“When we launched our new memecoin AMM platform in December 2024, I asked Hayden and Kelsier Ventures if they would be interested in launching a token on the M3M3 platform in order to provide an initial case study on how it worked,” he explained.

Chow added that his interactions with Davis and Kelsier Ventures led him to believe they were "trustworthy" and that he "referred them to a handful of other projects that had inquired with us about deployer firms, which included the team behind $MELANIA."

In a video that surfaced on X, DefiTuna founder Dhirk is seen talking to Chow, accusing Davis and Kelsier Ventures of engaging in insider trading during memecoin launches and claiming to have witnessed such activity firsthand during a trip to Barcelona.

Chow, who appeared visibly upset in the video, said, “I feel so sick, because I gave him MELANIA." He added, “I fucked up because I enabled the guy that should not have been enabled …I’m going to have to step down, I’m going to have to quit.”

Meteora has since hired an independent third-party firm, Fenwick & West, to investigate the allegations. The law firm will assess whether any insider trading occurred within the project. It was previously reported that Fenwick & West is also being sued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over its alleged role in helping crypto exchange FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried defraud the exchange's customers.

Meanwhile, Meteora has seen its Total Value Locked (TVL) drop to $1.02 billion from $1.52 billion in early January, while Jupiter's token, JUP, slipped 15% to $0.68 within 24 hours, bringing its market capitalization down to $1.7 billion from about $2 billion on Friday.