Judge Clears Solana in Pump.fun Lawsuit, RICO Survives

High attention and emotional sentiment detected.

The ruling cuts two ways. Solana Labs, the Solana Foundation, and five named executives are now out of the case. Yet the racketeering claims against Pump.fun and its three founders survive and head toward discovery.

What Judge McMahon Ruled

McMahon granted in part and denied in part three motions to dismiss. Her order, Document 184, addresses the Second Amended Consolidated Class Action Complaint in Aguilar v. Baton Corporation Ltd., No. 1:25-cv-00880, in the Southern District of New York.

Baton Corporation is the U.K. company that operates Pump.fun. So the ruling splits the defendants into two camps. The Solana side won dismissal. The Pump.fun side did not.

The court also dismissed the unjust enrichment claim against every moving defendant, and it did so with prejudice. That means plaintiffs cannot refile those claims on the same theory without a successful appeal.

Why FRED and GRIFFAIN Are Not Securities

The most cited part of the Pump.fun lawsuit is the securities holding. McMahon applied the Howey test to $FRED and $GRIFFAIN. She found the tokens, as pleaded, are not investment contracts.

Howey asks three questions. Was there an investment of money? Was it in a common enterprise? Did buyers expect profits from the efforts of others?

The judge accepted that buyers invested money, since they paid SOL for tokens. Then she stopped at the second prong. Plaintiffs did not plead a common enterprise under either horizontal or strict vertical commonality.

Here is the mechanism. A Pump.fun bonding curve is an automated pricing function. You buy, the price ticks up. You sell, it ticks down. Early sellers win because late buyers lose.

So the court reasoned that the tokens work like a zero-sum trading game, not a pooled venture whose success lifts every holder together. According to the opinion, Baton’s 1% platform fee is rent on volume, like a broker’s commission. It is not a shared profit split.

Importantly, the ruling does not clear every memecoin. The court distinguished cases such as SEC v. Kik and SEC v. Telegram, where plaintiffs alleged that issuers pooled proceeds to fund a promised network. A court could still treat tokens that fund a real enterprise as securities.

Solana Defendants Walk Free

The order dismissed all claims against Solana Labs, the Solana Foundation, Anatoly Yakovenko, Raj Gokal, Dan Albert, Austin Federa, and Lily Liu. These 12(b)(6) dismissals are with prejudice.

The judge treated the Solana parties as infrastructure builders. According to the opinion, FinCEN guidance excludes blockchain software providers from money-transmitter rules. As a result, the court rejected the unlicensed money transmission theory against them.

The court also would not infer that Solana executives knew about hidden influencer deals or false “fair launch” claims. As a result, the conspiracy theory against them failed as well.

What Survives in the Pump.fun Lawsuit

The RICO case is still alive. Counts I and II, for substantive racketeering and RICO conspiracy, remain pending against Baton Corporation, Alon Cohen, Dylan Kerler, and Noah Tweedale.

Only two plaintiffs carry those claims forward: Kendall Carnahan and Michael Okafor. Meanwhile the court dismissed all claims by plaintiff Diego Aguilar, finding he had not alleged a domestic RICO injury.

The surviving predicates include alleged wire fraud over “fair launch” marketing and unlicensed money transmission by the Baton defendants. Those claims now move toward discovery, including roughly 5,000 informant chats already in the record.

One loose end remains. The 25 unnamed influencer defendants, listed as Lead KOL Does, were never served. Plaintiffs must show cause by September 10, 2026 why those claims should survive.

Retail Cheers, Lawyers Push Back

The framing gap is wide. On X, the account SolanaFloor posted a short “Solana wins” headline that left out the surviving RICO claims.

Legal commentators pushed back fast. Attorney Ariel Givner, who shared PACER screenshots, warned that this is not a blanket ruling that memecoins are never securities.

According to Givner, a memecoin with no real enterprise behind it is not a security, but that reasoning is fact-specific. In her words, not a security does not mean not illegal. The RICO and money-transmission theories against Pump.fun still stand.

At research time, no dedicated story had appeared from CoinDesk, The Block, Bloomberg, Reuters, or Messari. The order was only hours old, so early accounts came from the docket and X threads.

Token Prices and What Comes Next

The market reaction stayed muted. SOL closed around $103 on August 31, up about 1.4% on the day, according to Binance data on Investing.com. No source tied that move to the ruling, and SOL had already traded choppily that week.

The two memecoins barely flinched. GRIFFAIN held near $0.0115 with a market cap around $11.5 million, per CoinGecko. FRED traded near $0.00045 on Solscan, with roughly 30,000 holders and thin liquidity.

Next comes a fight over class certification on the surviving RICO claims. An appeal on the dismissals is unlikely until a final judgment, absent a special certification from the court. For now, Solana is out, two tokens are cleared, and the Pump.fun lawsuit narrows to a racketeering case against its operator and founders.

This article is for information only and is not financial advice. Always do your own research before making any investment decision.