GoKawiilis a London-based reporter at The Verge covering all things AI and a Senior Tarbell Fellow. Previously, he wrote about health, science and tech for Forbes.
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The crypto weed vape found me on 4/20, the high holiday of cannabis enthusiasts everywhere. It arrived over Slack with the thumbnail of a man exhaling a plume of vapor, the words “every hit delivers Bitcoin” emblazoned across it. It claimed to be advertising a device called Gudtrip, and I thought everything about it sounded fake.
So I went looking for it. What I eventually found, after weeks of searching, dozens of emails, and a reporting effort that spanned continents, was somehow even dumber than I’d imagined.
The Gudtrip weed vape’s message seems clear in this screenshot of their website. Image: Gudtrip
My first port of call was Gudtrip’s website, which only made the vape seem more like a prank. The company’s description of the product was tech buzzword bingo — this wasn’t just a vape that delivered Bitcoin, it was “the first agentic cannabis device” combining “premium cannabis, blockchain rewards, and AI-powered asset tools in one product.” This alleged device wasn’t just running on crypto hype: now AI was in the mix, too.
But I did find one sign that the product was real. The website said that its vapes were available in California, with New York also listed as “coming soon.” And there was a name for the brand behind it: Puffpaw, a company that presents itself as the maker of the “world’s first gamified smart vape” for nicotine. Somehow, it’s supposed to incentivize quitting nicotine through a mechanism that, like Gudtrip, I did not understand.
I went to Gudtrip’s social accounts to scour for more. The product appeared to have quietly launched in March. Otherwise, most posts reiterated that by using Gudtrip, you’d get some Bitcoin. Gudtrip’s pinned post on X as of this writing reads, “Smoke weed and earn @Bitcoin.” Another asks: “new yorkers are you ready to smoke a joint and earn bitcoin?” On Threads, Gudtrip posted about “building wealth one puff at a time” and explained that users can “Earn Bitcoin from every single puff.” A pulsating TikTok video described the vape as “the high that pays you back.”
It was enough to convince me the product might be real. This was, somehow, shaping up to be a real vape. But I did not understand in the slightest how it worked. Does the vape mine Bitcoin? I emailed Gudtrip to find out.
Gudtrip didn’t get back to me right away, so I started looking for more. On LinkedIn, I found one “Reffo T., listed as CEO of Gudtrip, “a premium cannabis brand turning consumption into an onchain earning experience.” He’d written a blog post coaxing dispensaries to stock these vapes. “The product sells itself,” he wrote. “The Bitcoin just makes sure customers remember where they got it.”
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