Wayne Kacheche believed in Dogecoin because Elon Musk did. The Tesla founder and billionaire kept talking up the popular meme token on Twitter, and in May 2021 even joked about Dogecoin during a Saturday Night Live segment. Shortly after the episode aired, Dogecoin plunged 40%.
Kacheche, then a 19-year-old university student living in South Africa, decided to check out Dogecoin. He started watching YouTube videos and came to share a widespread sentiment in the crypto world that Dogecoin had peaked. He began to search for altcoins, going down an algorithmic rabbit hole that brought him to a crypto influencer named Crypto Pablo. After two months of investing, Kacheche believed the channel mostly pushed scams.
“I was still a newborn to the crypto space,” Kacheche said. “I stopped following his shilling and also unsubscribed from his channel.”
A week or two later, the YouTube algorithm spat out Lark Davis—the “Crypto Lark.”
Today, Davis is a prominent crypto influencer with about 1 million followers on both Twitter and Instagram, and nearly 500,000 on YouTube. Davis has a cherubic countenance and earnest demeanor, speaking directly to his viewers in the videos he posts often multiple times a day with titles like “This Coin Made Millionaires.” He comes across as a baby-faced Jim Cramer, if the CNBC host was the nextdoor neighbor’s grandson shilling shitcoins—crypto slang for tokens of dubious value—instead of stocks.
In late September,…
