> Wen didn’t have any money of his own. (This past January, he had a balance of negative sixteen dollars in his Royal Bank of Canada savings account.) But his m

> Wen didn’t have any money of his own. (This past January, he had a balance of negative sixteen dollars in his Royal Bank of Canada savings account.) But his mom had some bitcoin, which she’d bought a few months earlier after hearing about it from a friend on WeChat. She lent all of it to her son, and he then converted a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of it to bitclout. His first move on the platform was to persuade some of his friends to join, and the group proceeded to buy shares in one another. Next, Wen invested in the TikTok stars Dom Brack and Jeremy Hutchins. Three days later, he had made around six thousand dollars. He started planning to buy a new MacBook and a pair of AirPods Pro. “Back then, it was a lot, right?” he told me, a month later, over Zoom. Wen has an undercut topped with a mop of floppy hair, which he constantly runs his fingers through. He smiles often, the left corner of his mouth slightly higher than the other, producing an impish effect. We spoke on April 30th. At that point, he owned multiple BitClout profiles, which he told me had reached a combined estimated value of half a million dollars. Today, he’s grown that figure to approximately $1.7 million, or nine thousand and four bitclout, or sixty-eight hundred pairs of AirPods Pro. “To me, it’s just numbers,” Wen said. It's unfortunate that anecdotes like these will cause so many more people to lose their money, who don't understand that they're gambling, and with more than they can afford to lose.