Since the Argentine president briefly supported the $LIBRA coin, the interest groups of the entire solana ecosystem MEME coin have been greatly discussed, and a venture capital firm called Kelsier Ventures has surfaced.
On the surface, it is a venture capital firm focusing on investment and marketing in the Web3 field. In fact, it was exposed as an insider team that carefully planned the memecoin project. Not only $LIBRA, Kelsier is also deeply involved in $MELANIA (Mrs. Trumps coin). According to The Big Whales investigation, Kelsier Ventures also tried to expand this model to Nigeria and contacted members of the government. According to an insider, The project has reached a fairly mature stage. There are also signs that Kelsier Ventures is also negotiating with other countries and plans to replicate the same memecoin issuance model.
As the Kelsier Ventures scandal continues to ferment, more and more insider trading, fund transfers and political involvement have surfaced. Who is this Kelsier Ventures? What is its background? Who supports it?
The Davis family’s network behind Kelsier Ventures
First, lets look at the official information. Kelsier Ventures official website (Kelsier.io) describes itself as promoting Web3 innovation through market promotion expertise, in-depth research and targeted investment. They claim to provide support at all stages of the project, from conception to market launch, providing tailored and comprehensive support.
Apparently, after the scandal, its official website has deleted more information, including the introduction of team members. In the previous screenshots provided by community members, we can see that the team members are as follows, which will be introduced in detail later.
Among the various financing news reported by other overseas media, BlockBeats only found three financing information of this venture capital:
In May 2024, Kelsier organized a funding round that raised $3.5 million to support E Money Network, a company focused on asset tokenization and virtual wallet development.
Earlier in November 2023, Kelsier and others also participated in the financing of Saturn, a Bitcoin non-custodial P2P order book service provider, led by Big Brain Holdings, and other financiers included UTXO Management and BOOGLE Syndicate.
The most recent investment was on January 16, 2025, when Kelsier Ventures invested $30,000 in Solanas DeFi protocol Defituna, becoming its second smallest investor. Now, after the Kelsier Ventures scandal, Defituna has returned the investment amount.
Now let’s look at the team members of Kelsier Ventures, a true family business. Hayden is the CEO, his father Tom is the chairman, and his brother Gideon is the COO.
Davis family portrait
According to BlockBeats, the Davis family seems to have always had a deep obsession with creating a family business.
In Episode 9 of their podcast Young Dumb Woke, Hayden and his brother Gideon interviewed their father Tom and mentioned how excited they were to start a family business.
In the blog of their mother Emily Chynoweth Davis, it is also mentioned that we created a family business in 2023, which can make our family like a wolf, tightly bound to our family. The family business mentioned here should be Kelsier Ventures.
The following are some of the core members:
CEO: Hayden
The first is Hayden Mark Davis, who is the most critical member of Kelsier Ventures and one of the main promoters of the Argentine Presidents Milecoin LIBRA. He has become the focus of public attention in recent self-exposures and interviews.
In a recent interview, The LIBRA team behind the scenes faces the camera for the first time: 10,000 words reveal the truth about the harvesting of Argentinas presidential currency , Hayden admitted that the team had tried to snipe the funds to run away in the hope of controlling market volatility. He insisted that the collapse of LIBRA was a failure of the plan rather than cutting leeks, and the team did not directly profit from the MELANIA token.
Currently, Hayden still holds about $100 million in funds, and he said he is weighing how to deal with the funds, including refunds, reinjection of funds into the market, or donations to non-profit organizations in Argentina. However, he refused to hand over the funds immediately, believing that he had the leverage to negotiate with the Argentine government as a custodian. He emphasized that the Milei team did not provide him with any specific instructions, so he must decide on his own where the funds will eventually go.
Although Hayden calls himself a serial entrepreneur, he is virtually unknown on the Internet, with only 35 connections on his LinkedIn account.
According to his LinkedIn profile, since October 2020 he has been the CEO of Kelsier, a long-time resident of Los Angeles, California, USA, and since May of the same year he has been the founder of Luxury Drip, a company in an unknown sector (although there is an Italian brand of the same name, which belongs to the field of urban fashion).
According to Davis, he has been running a business called Leaders Elevate since August 2017. This appears to be another family business of the Davis family, selling courses and private coaching on leadership topics with his father as the main mentor.
Although the difference in weight in the photo is striking, it looks like the same person:
After Javier Milei uploaded a photo with Hayden Davis, many questions arose about this virtually unknown entrepreneur. Searching for the full name Hayden Mark Davis, the results were mainly focused on news reports about the LIBRA collapse.
Photo of Hayden and Mile
The only other social activity related to him is a photo from February 2022, in which he appears with two people named Thomas Davis and Gideon Davis, who appear as co-founder and CEO of Kelsier Ventures, respectively. Little is known about these two people.
Currently, his personal social media accounts have been set to private.
Chairmans father: Tom
In contrast, their father, Tom Davis, had a more dramatic life, and more traces of his life can be found on the Internet.
In more of Toms own writings, his childhood was not ordinary. His biological father was absent, and his stepfather was an alcoholic soldier who was often abused. At the age of 18, Tom experienced a serious suicide crisis. After that, Tom was targeted by the FBI for forging his identity. Facing the accusation, Tom chose to tell the whole story, and even took the initiative to confess some criminal facts that the FBI had not yet grasped. This thorough honesty shocked the agents, and in the end, he was sentenced to one year in federal prison instead of the expected 60 to 70 years.
After serving his sentence, Tom restarted his life. He became a youth pastor and actively involved in charity work. Tom Davis is a multi-faceted person - he is an entrepreneur, speaker, author, humanitarian, and served as CEO of Childrens HopeChest for 15 years. This is a charity focused on helping orphans and widows around the world. However, he later stopped this work and founded Leaders Elevate, an online course aimed at cultivating CEO leadership, personal growth and development.
In addition to his philanthropy, he has authored five published books, including Fields of the Fatherless, Red Letters, Confessions of a Good Christian Guy, and two novels, Scared: A Novel on the Edge of the World and Priceless. He has also published articles in 25 national publications and is writing a doctoral dissertation on the impact of positive psychology on dynamic team structures.
In the 9th episode of the podcast Young Dumb Woke by Hayden Davis and his brother Gideon Davis mentioned above, the two brothers interviewed their father Tom Davis and introduced how they entered the crypto industry:
As one of the three partners of a chain restaurant on the East Coast of the United States, his chain brand operates 34 restaurants on the East Coast. In order to seek a wider market, he decided to expand his business to the Middle East and registered a company in Dubai.
During his time in Dubai, Tom came across an article about Dubais plan to build the worlds third Crypto Valley. Previously, similar Crypto Valleys had been established in Switzerland and Malaysia, with the goal of attracting blockchain, digital asset and crypto companies through tax incentives and innovative policies. The article inspired him to come up with the idea of starting a blockchain company in Dubai, which he quickly implemented.
Soon, Tom was deeply involved in the crypto industry. He not only actively participated in related conferences, but also successfully launched his own cryptocurrency project (Tom did not name the specific project). At the same time, he began to contact top figures in the field, build connections, and get involved in venture capital funds, investing in multiple early projects. Today, these investments not only make him part of the industry, but also give him a seat in the leadership of some projects.
Although Tom has deleted a lot of information about himself and Kelsier Ventures, we can still find some traces of the past. Initially, Tom also called himself the CEO of Kelsier Ventures.
More direct evidence is that in the last 10 minutes of this podcast, Tom finally mentioned Kelsier Ventures: What excites me even more is that this business doesnt just belong to me, but is a family business.
This has always been his vision, to build an empire with his sons, just like Ding Hai. Today, this dream is gradually coming true. He and his family are involved in the crypto industry together. Although their funds have not yet reached the scale of the worlds top hedge funds, they have been able to participate in some important projects in Dubai. Today, Tom has officially become a resident of Dubai.
COOs younger brother: Gideon
Next up is Haydens brother Gideon Davis. In the family business, Kelsier Ventures, Gideon Davis serves as the Chief Operating Officer (COO), responsible for the companys daily operations and investment management.
Although there is relatively little public information about him, clues on social media and past podcast records can outline the projects he has been involved in in the crypto industry. In 2022, Gideon is still a junior in college, but he has already begun to get involved in the crypto industry, working in the DeFi project Unlock and its metaverse project NeoNexus.
NeoNexus NFT Series
NeoNexus is a metaverse project built on the Solana blockchain, which plans to provide virtual real estate, character, vehicle and accessory NFTs, and has designed a governance token system. The project once claimed to have sold 4,000 sets of virtual real estate NFTs, and plans to sell another 6,000 sets of real estate NFTs in the future, and launch corresponding governance and utility tokens.
However, on March 21, 2022, NeoNexus founder Jack Shi suddenly announced the cessation of operations due to insufficient funds and fired all employees, claiming that he was willing to hand over the project to the community.
This soft rug incident caused great doubts in the crypto community at the time: it is estimated that NeoNexus has raised about 25,000 SOL through NFT since September 2021. According to the SOL price at the time, the amount of funds raised was between US$3.425 million and US$6.475 million. However, the project suddenly announced in March 2022 that it had run out of funds and failed to continue operations.
Rumors of political connections
Seeing this, although the Davis family has experience and resources in the crypto industry, they seem to lack some strength to be able to issue coins for the First Lady of the US President and the President of Argentina.
As BlockBeats dug deeper, we found two unconfirmed political connections:
1. Haydens uncle, Toms brother Glen, is a close friend of Trump. Because of this relationship, the Davis family has established a connection with Trump.
2. Another theory is that Hayden’s mother, Tom’s wife Emily Chynoweth Davis, is a close friend of Melania Trump’s wife. The Davis family, with Kelsier Ventures as the main body, has issued card NFTs and $MELANIA coins to Melania.
Other interest chains
Kelsier Ventures did not act alone. A deeper interest group was involved behind it. Some whistleblowers in the incident revealed a lot of truth for us.
Image courtesy of Chaofan Shou
According to information exposed by Chaofan Shou, M 3 M 3 Launchpad is actually an important platform used by Kelsier Ventures to manipulate memecoin, and it has become a hotbed for a series of token launches. In the entire operating structure, Kelsier Ventures, the behind-the-scenes operator, is responsible for fund scheduling, information leakage, and deciding when to launch the project, while its CEO Hayden Davis plays the role of developer and executor. In addition, Axiom MM may act as a market maker or middleman to ensure that market liquidity is manipulated to create price fluctuations, while M 3 M 3 Launchpad serves as a white glove platform to help a large number of memecoin projects such as ENRON, MELANIA, BOB, M 3 M 3, AIAI, LIBRA, etc. issue tokens. More noteworthy is that KIP (a group associated with the government of Argentine President Miller) may provide political support and shelter for the organizations operations in the Argentine market.
M 3 M 3 Launchpad
M 3 M 3 Launchpad is a memecoin launch platform that helps issue coins during the event. After DefiTuna founder Moty and the Solana community revealed, M 3 M 3 Launchpad pretended to be an independent platform, but in fact, it was completely controlled by Meteora co-founder Ben and was used by Kelsier Ventures as a tool to manipulate memecoin prices.
Therefore, it is not difficult to understand that on December 5, 2024, a Meteora blog suddenly introduced the M 3 M 3 Launchpad project.
The first token launched by M3M3 Launchpad is $M3M3, which is almost a replica of $MELANIA and $LIBARA in terms of trend.
“Don’t buy $ M3M3 ! It is completely controlled by internal snipers!” Community members had issued a warning before the interest group was exposed.
In addition, Moty, the founder of DefiTuna, revealed that more than $200 million of funds were withdrawn by insiders in multiple memecoin projects, including several tokens launched on the M3 M3 Launchpad: $AIAI, $MATES, $ENRON, etc. The $AIAI and $MATES projects are particularly noteworthy. Their prices plummeted by 95% in a short period of time after they were launched, causing community investors to lose all their money. As one of the first projects on the memecoin issuance platform, $M3 M3 also plummeted by 95%.
Including these multiple project tokens, Kelsier Ventures and its manipulation team earned more than $200 million in profits. Moty, the founder of DefiTuna, broke the news.
DefiTuna was originally a DeFi platform. On January 16, 2025, Kelsier Ventures invested $30,000 in it and connected it with employee Thomas, hoping that DefiTuna could provide liquidity for M 3 M 3.
Thomas is also among the Kelsier Ventures team members mentioned above, and is ranked only after three family members, Hayden, Tom, and Gideon, which shows his importance and deep involvement.
Under Kelsiers pressure, projects on M3M3 allocated token supply to DefiTuna, and DefiTuna co-founder Vlad passively participated without realizing the problem. Kelsier further asked DefiTuna to manage liquidity on M3M3, including the MATES project, which plummeted 95% after listing.
However, as DefiTuna discovered more and more suspicious things during the operation, they realized that M3 was not a real decentralized launch platform but a tool used by Kelsier to manipulate the market. The most controversial incident occurred during the MELANIA token issuance:
1. Kelsier revealed inside information. Before the issuance of MELANIA tokens, Kelsier informed DefiTuna that Melania’s official X account would post relevant tweets, and Trump would retweet them to help hype up the price of the currency.
2. Secretly transfer 1% of tokens
Kelsier sent 1% of MELANIA’s token supply (worth $100 million at its peak) to DefiTuna, asking it to be used for “liquidity management.”
3. Hayden Davis instructs Vlad to sell anonymously
Hayden Davis further asked Vlad to sell the tokens anonymously to avoid on-chain tracking. However, after discussing with DefiTuna founder Moty, Vlad finally decided to return all the funds.
Currently, DefiTuna has completely severed all cooperation with Kelsier Ventures, refunded Kelsiers $30,000 investment, and publicly accused Kelsier of manipulating the market through the M 3 M 3 launch pad and withdrawing huge amounts of funds.
Fund Flow: Axiom MM, Cube Exchange Connection
In the insider trading network of Kelsier Ventures, the flow of funds is particularly critical, and Axiom MM and Cube Exchange play the roles of market manipulation, fund laundering and channel delivery respectively. Although these projects are not directly affiliated with Kelsier on the surface, on-chain data and community revelations reveal the intricate interests between them.
Axiom MM is a market maker in the Solana ecosystem. According to the accusations of DefiTuna founder Moty and community revelations, Kelsier Ventures may use Axiom MM for insider trading and market manipulation: during the issuance of $LIBRA, $MELANIA, $M 3 M 3, $AIAI, and $MATES, Axiom MM may be responsible for creating false trading volume, causing the coin price to surge in a short period of time, attracting retail investors to enter the market; when the behind-the-scenes trading team decides to cash out, Axiom MM may adjust its trading strategy, causing the market to quickly lose liquidity, thereby accelerating the price collapse.
On-chain data shows that several associated wallets of Axiom MM conducted a series of abnormal transactions before and after the issuance of $LIBRA: a large amount of $LIBRA was bought a few minutes before the token went online, pushing the initial price up; a large amount of selling was done for profit at the peak of market FOMO; and on the eve of the token collapse, liquidity was stopped, causing the market depth to disappear instantly.
These behaviors are highly consistent with typical market manipulation strategies, causing the community to begin to question whether Axiom MM has a profit transfer relationship with Kelsier Ventures.
Cube Exchange is also involved. Through community research, it was found that Cube Exchange is a client of Kelsier. Kelsier provides consulting, marketing, and KOL resources for it; Hayden Davis (Kelsier CEO) was an early investor in Cube Exchange; and multiple Kelsier-related wallets have conducted large transactions on Cube Exchange.
“Most people in the photo have worked at or have connections with Cube Exchange. Cube Exchange is a client of Kelsier and is responsible for consulting, marketing, KOLs, etc. But I’m not sure if they were directly involved in any inappropriate behavior,” a community member revealed.
Also implicated is BOOGLE, a ghost-themed NFT project built on Solana with a total of only 100.
But all three members of the incident have BOOGLE as their Twitter profile picture. In addition, as mentioned above, Kelsier and BOOGLE jointly participated in the financing of Saturn, a Bitcoin non-custodial P2P order book service provider. Therefore, as the Kelsier incident was exposed, community members began to question whether BOOGLE provided a cover for insider trading or whether there was a vested interest between them.
But it has been denied by BOOGLE: Our conspiracy group is not involved in Kelsier or $LIBRA. But it admitted that three Kelsier-related members were once its NFT holders and said they had been removed.
Meteora Jupiter Deep Collusion
In the accusation of the founder of DefiTuna, Meteora and Jupiter are considered to be deeper interest groups outside of Kelsier Ventures, and they are deeply colluding. The following is the revelation of Moty, the founder of DefiTuna, and the reasoning of other community members:
In a series of memecoin manipulation incidents, Meteora is not an innocent third party, but an important partner of Kelsier.
Ben Chow himself is deeply involved in Kelsiers M3M3 Launchpad. Although the platform is claimed to be independent, the actual control is always in the hands of Meteora and its founding team.
In $LIBRA, $MELANIA and other memecoin projects, Meteora provided key liquidity management, technical support, and helped Kelsier with market manipulation. For example, during the issuance of multiple memecoins on the M 3 M 3 Launchpad, Meteora was responsible for ensuring that most tokens flowed into the hands of insider traders, while retail investors became the target of harvesting.
It is reported that Meteora was founded by Ben Chow and later acquired by Jupiter. According to public information, Ben Chow is also a co-founder of Jupiter. The two co-founded each other.
KOL @Ed_x 0101 also posted on X (Twitter) that he had liquidated $JUP for the following reasons: many memecoin projects that harvest retail investors have direct or indirect links with Jupiter; Jupiter may be involved in insider trading and market manipulation, and even involve legal risks; after the collapse of $LIBRA, insider traders were compensated, while ordinary retail investors lost all their money.
More importantly, many community members pointed out that Kelsier might just be a white glove and the real manipulators behind the scenes are the Jupiter team and liquidity management agencies.
As the scandal came to light, Ben Chow announced his resignation from Meteora on February 17, 2025, and clarified that Meteora and he had never held, received or managed any $LIBRA tokens; in the memecoin project, Meteora only provided IT technical support and did not participate in the off-chain transactions of tokens; there was no special relationship between them and Kelsier, and they only cooperated during the M3M3 period.
However, this move was interpreted by the outside world as an attempt to distance itself from the Kelsier incident and to preserve Meteora in order to prevent regulatory and legal risks from affecting the Jupiter ecosystem.
Jupiter, on its part, also hired Fenwick West, an independent third-party law firm, to conduct an investigation and issue a report on the insider trading issue.
However, some community members do not trust the law firm because it is the general counsel of FTX and was sued for allegedly assisting FTX in fraud. A joint report in 2022 mentioned that it is Sun Yuchens favorite law firm and was previously responsible for the reorganization of Poloniex.
Whether it is Kelsier’s manipulation of the issuance of memecoin or his deep collusion with politicians, market makers, and trading platforms, it shows that this is not just a financial scam in the crypto market, but may involve broader interests.
In this storm, the credibility of the Solana ecosystem has also been questioned unprecedentedly. On the one hand, Solana, as one of the most popular blockchains since 2024, has risen rapidly due to the prosperity of memecoin transactions. But on the other hand, whether this prosperity supported by memecoin transactions has long-term sustainability has become the focus of market discussion.
With the collapse of a series of air coin projects, is Solana falling into a trap driven by FOMO funds and lacking practical application support? If the market confidence collapses completely, can SOL once again stage a counterattack miracle similar to 2023-2024, get rid of the crisis again, and achieve self-repair of the market? BlockBeats will continue to pay attention.
