On Friday, October 2, 2026, Darren Anselmo filed a class action complaint in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York against Dapper Labs, Inc. and Flow Foundation, alleging the two organizations misled buyers of the Flow Token by portraying the Flow blockchain as decentralized and controlled by its community.
Anselmo, a New York citizen, seeks to represent all people who purchased or acquired Flow Tokens and still held them on December 27, 2025. The complaint, filed by The Rosen Law Firm, estimates the class at thousands of members and demands a jury trial.
Dapper Labs, which created the Flow blockchain, is based in Vancouver and lists New York among its hubs. The Flow Foundation describes itself as a nonprofit supporting the network. The complaint alleges that the leadership of both organizations, including Dapper Labs CEO Roham Gharegozlou and Flow Foundation Chief Architect Dieter Shirley, operated as a single “Core Team.”
According to the filing, the companies promoted Flow as decentralized for years. It cites a 2021 statement from a Dapper Labs representative that the network was controlled by the community, and a Flow Foundation web page describing the blockchain as fully decentralized. The complaint also points to a 2024 settlement in a separate lawsuit before the same court, Friel v. Dapper Labs, in which Dapper Labs reaffirmed its commitment to decentralization.
The complaint centers on events that began on December 27, 2025, when an attacker exploited a vulnerability in the Flow network and minted counterfeit tokens. It says more than 1,000 accounts were affected and about $3.9 million was extracted. Validators halted the network roughly six hours after the first malicious transaction, according to the filing.
That day, the Flow Foundation announced a plan to restore the network to a checkpoint before the exploit. The complaint says the plan drew criticism from commentators and from Alex Smirnov, co-founder of bridge provider deBridge, who said his company had received no communication from the Flow team and urged validators not to validate the rolled-back chain.
On December 28, the foundation announced a revised approach, called the Isolated Recovery Plan. It involved a temporary software upgrade, known as Mainnet 28, giving the network’s privileged “service account” the ability to withdraw and destroy tokens from affected accounts. The complaint says validators accepted the upgrade within hours.
The plaintiff alleges that the core team initially avoided that option because it could undermine public perception of decentralization. The complaint also says the service account requires four signatures, three of which can come from accounts controlled by the foundation. It further alleges that the team bypassed its own published upgrade process, which calls for releases to be made public at least 14 days in advance and source code at least seven days in advance.
On December 29, Dapper Labs said on social media that no single entity had controlled the outcome and that the recovery reflected community consensus.
The complaint says the price of the Flow Token fell more than 40% after the rollback announcement and that the token’s market value dropped by over $100 million within hours, with losses later exceeding $400 million. It states that the claims “do not sound in fraud.”
The complaint asserts six counts: violations of New York General Business Law Sections 349 and 350, the California Unfair Competition Law, the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act, and unjust enrichment. It seeks class certification, unspecified damages, restitution, injunctive relief, interest, and attorneys’ fees and costs.
Please contact BlockTribune for access to a copy of this filing.
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