United States Senator Elizabeth Warren is asking Jimmy Donaldson, aka “MrBeast,” and Beast Industries CEO Jeff Housenbold to clarify why they acquired a teen app that coached minors to stress their mother and father into shopping for crypto.
The 12-page letter calls for solutions about why Donaldson purchased the app, referred to as Step, that revealed word-for-word scripts teaching teenagers.
“Crypto and stock investing is not taught in my school, but by using Step, it’ll teach me life skills like how to balance risk and rewards,” the script advised youngsters to recite to their guardians.
“Mom, you’ve had Apple stock forever, bitcoin has just as much potential,” it continued.
After MrBeast’s acquisition in February, the proprietor of Step’s YouTube account set most of its movies to non-public to stop them from being publicly viewable.
Step claims to serve about 7 million clients and focuses on minors.
Step, the youngsters banking app lately acquired by MrBeast, made a sequence of movies teaching children on the way to manipulate their mother and father into letting them purchase crypto.
The movies, referenced in a letter despatched by Sen Elizabeth Warren yesterday, have all been deleted. pic.twitter.com/sVbq4SL6Tg
— Jason Mikula (@mikulaja) March 24, 2026
In 2022, the corporate launched crypto buying and selling for teenagers by way of Zero Hash LLC. Step claimed to be “the first platform to allow teens, with the consent of a parent or legal guardian, to responsibly participate first-hand in the rapidly evolving investing landscape, starting with buying and selling bitcoin.”
By April 2022, Step boasted that teenagers beneath 18 years outdated would have the ability to “access 50+ tokens” and would “be able to buy NFTs.”
It didn’t mince phrases about whether or not these purchases could be incidental, de minimis values for instructional functions.
On the contrary, it referred to as the providing an “investing platform” to “ensure the next generation is prepared for their financial futures.”
Script for youths nonetheless reside on YouTube in late 2024
Whereas the corporate claimed minors might make investments solely with parental consent, Step constructed the consent bypass toolkit itself with its scripted teaching tutorials.
A evaluation of YouTube URLs confirms that they now return personal notices. A number of of the unique hyperlinks nonetheless show metadata in Google caches.
Though Step promoted crypto closely earlier than MrBeast acquired it, it discontinued a number of of its choices over time.
Nonetheless, the script teenagers had been supposed to make use of to persuade their mother and father to put money into crypto was nonetheless reside on YouTube as lately as December 28, 2024.
That’s years after the preliminary crypto investing initiative by Step and greater than half a 12 months after Step’s Might 1, 2024 declare that it had shut down all crypto investing accounts.
The corporate seems to have totally ended its crypto investing post-acquisition.
Bitmine’s ETH firm helped MrBeast purchase Step
Beast Industries acquired Step after a $200 million funding from Bitmine Immersion Applied sciences, Tom Lee’s ether (ETH) treasury firm.
Bitmine, embarrassingly, has misplaced more cash investing in ETH than even FTX’s buyer deposits.
MrBeast’s YouTube channel has greater than 470 million subscribers. About 39% of his viewers are between ages 13 and 17, with the overwhelming majority of his viewers youthful than 25.
In late 2025, Beast Holdings LLC filed a trademark for MrBeast Monetary. It talked about crypto alternate companies and decentralized alternate transactions.
MrBeast has an April 3 deadline to reply to the senator’s questions.
