A teenager created his own crypto coin and earned thousands of euros. A few hours later his shares were worth several million.
How did the 13-year-old earn the money? A 13-year-old American created his own crypto coin called “Gen Z Quant” and earned $30,000 (around €28,000) in just 8 minutes, the boy’s father tells the online magazine Wired.
The 13-year-old created 1 billion units of the coin and invested $350 of his own money to buy 51 million tokens of the cryptocurrency. He then started a livestream on the website where he was offering the coin and showed himself doing it.
Over the next 8 minutes, the cryptocurrency was then purchased by various people, bringing the 13-year-old’s coins to a total value of $30,000. He then had his coins paid out and cheered into the camera: “Holy shit! Holy shit! Holy shit! Thanks for the twenty bandos.” He is said to have held up two middle fingers into the camera and stuck out his tongue.
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Why could he be a millionaire now? After the 13-year-old dumped his tokens, the price of the cryptocurrency dropped significantly because he owned such a large stake in the currency. This procedure is also called “rug pull”.
A rug pull is considered a type of crypto fraud with which the founders of such a coin hope to make quick money. According to Wired, this is a legal gray area, but ethically questionable in the crypto community.
The coin’s investors were angry and wanted revenge, so the 13-year-old and his parents were confronted with insults, among other things, says the boy’s father. Shortly afterwards, pictures and the names of family members were also spread on the Internet.
But according to Wired, the revenge of the angry investors wasn’t over yet. They are said to have continued to invest in the coin – also in revenge – which increased the value of the currency to up to 72 million US dollars. The 13-year-old’s shares would have been worth around $3 million the next morning.
As the 13-year-old’s father reports, the family wasn’t particularly happy about their son making thousands of dollars due to the intimidating online presence of disgruntled investors:
“In the end, a lot of people made money with his coin. But for those of us caught in the middle, there was a lot of emotion. The online backlash became so scary that the realization that he was making money was somehow tempered by the fact that people got angry and started bullying him.”
Investing in cryptocurrencies always involves a certain amount of risk, which is why you should think carefully before putting your money into such a token. It was only in October 2024 that the head of the text AI “ChatGPT” advised against investing in what is probably the best-known crypto currency: The head of the AI bot ChatGPT expressly warns why you should not buy Bitcoin at the moment