On Wednesday, September 2, 2026, Judge Katherine Mary Polk Failla of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed a lawsuit brought by blockchain investor On Yavin against Baller Entertainment Ltd, Astronomica Inc., and Jonathan Weinberg over compensation Yavin received in the form of a defunct video game’s cryptocurrency.
Yavin, along with the Cointelligence Fund LP and Online Performance OÜ, had sued the defendants in May 2025, alleging that Weinberg and his companies misled Yavin about the fate of Beast League, a blockchain-based mobile basketball game, while paying him in Beast Coin, the game’s in-game token. According to the complaint, Weinberg secretly pivoted development resources to a new game, Boinkers, while continuing to assure Yavin that Beast League remained a priority — leaving Yavin’s token compensation effectively worthless once Beast League was abandoned.
Yavin, a longtime blockchain investor and advisor based in London, had entered into two advisory agreements with Baller, a British Virgin Islands company controlled by Weinberg, a California resident. Under the first agreement, signed in September 2023, Yavin was to receive 1,000,000 Beast Coin tokens as his “sole compensation” for consulting on Baller’s blockchain gaming strategy. A second agreement, executed in April 2024, entitled him to 1.5% of the total Beast Coin supply. Yavin’s investment fund had also put $100,000 into Baller in 2022 in exchange for a token allocation under a separate agreement.
Weinberg allegedly revealed to Yavin in April 2024 — just 13 days after the second agreement was signed — that he was considering developing a second blockchain game, and by the following month had begun publicly promoting Boinkers, which went on to attract roughly 11 million monthly users. When Yavin raised concerns, Weinberg allegedly promised that Beast Coin holders would be able to swap their tokens for the new Boinkers Coin, but later reneged.
The lawsuit included one federal claim for securities fraud under Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5, along with seven state-law claims including breach of contract, unjust enrichment, and fraudulent inducement.
Judge Failla ruled that the court had personal jurisdiction over all three defendants but dismissed the claims against Astronomica, a Delaware-incorporated company also controlled by Weinberg, on forum non conveniens grounds, finding that Astronomica was not sufficiently bound by a forum-selection clause in Yavin’s advisory agreement with Baller.
On the merits, Failla assumed without deciding that Yavin’s compensation agreement qualified as an “investment contract” under the Supreme Court’s Howey test, but found the securities fraud claim failed because the transaction did not qualify as “domestic” under the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Morrison v. National Australia Bank. She found that Plaintiffs failed to show where “irrevocable liability” attached to the Beast Coin transfer, and separately concluded that even if the transaction were domestic, the case was “so predominantly foreign” — involving a private compensation deal between an Estonian contractor and a British Virgin Islands company — to fall within the reach of U.S. securities law.
Failla also ruled that Yavin’s investment fund and consulting entity, Online Performance OÜ, lacked standing to bring the securities claim because they were not direct purchasers of Beast Coin.
Having dismissed the sole federal claim, Failla declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the remaining state-law claims, dismissing them without prejudice to refiling in state court. She denied Plaintiffs leave to amend the federal claim, finding further amendment would be futile, and dismissed the federal claims against Baller and Weinberg with prejudice.
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