We Sat Down With Solana's Hottest Young Dev And Things Got Weird Fast

The restaurant he chose is a Cheesecake Factory in Glendale. He is seventeen. He arrives twenty-two minutes late wearing a hoodie that reads WAGMI in block letters and immediately orders a virgin strawberry lemonade, which he does not touch for the duration of our conversation. His handler — a college-aged guy he introduces only as "my guy Brent" — sits at an adjacent table and monitors our recorder with the intensity of a man defusing something.

We are here to talk about CHADS, the token he launched in January that hit a $40M fully diluted valuation in its first week before correcting 73% in a single afternoon. He does not want to talk about the correction. He wants to talk about the "vision." The vision, as best we can understand it across ninety minutes of interview, involves a DAO, a mobile game that is "kind of like Roblox but the economy is real," and what he describes no fewer than six times as "community-first tokenomics." We ask what that means. He says "it means the community comes first." Brent shifts in his chair.

Midway through the interview he excuses himself to "handle something." He returns four minutes later looking at his phone with the expression of a person who has just watched their net worth change by a meaningful percentage. He does not tell us which direction. The rest of the interview is shorter than planned. His parting words, directed not at us but at his lemonade: "Brent, I told you not to let it go below the line." We do not know what line. Brent does not answer. The lemonade, for what it's worth, remains untouched.