I went looking for the AI weed vape that gives you Bitcoin for smoking

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.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.”Weed is legal in California, but products are regulated. So I asked California’s Department of Cannabis Control, which licenses and regulates commercial cannabis activity in the state, whether it permits products that reward consumption. Jordan Traverso, the department’s deputy director of public affairs, said the agency hadn’t heard of Gudtrip’s AI crypto vape. “We were not previously familiar with the Gudtrip product but have reached out to the manufacturer to learn more about its features,” he wrote. That made two of us.At this point, I’d reached the limit of what I could do from London. So I asked my US colleagues for help. Gudtrip claimed to be available in California in exactly two stores. It just so happened that a colleague was in the area to swing by the dispensary to see once and for all: Does this vape actually exist?Upon walking in the door of the NUG Cannabis Dispensary in Oakland, we found the answer: A massive Gudtrip poster immediately promised customers “ongoing Crypto Rewards over time.” It read, plainly, “Get High. Get Bitcoin.”Obviously, we bought it. The AI weed vape cost $67 after tax.That was also when Gudtrip replied — and somehow, things became even more hazy.The whole “paying people to smoke weed” thing sounded pretty catchy, but it didn’t sound entirely legal. (It doesn’t sound particularly healthy, either. Researchers speaking to crypto outlet DL News said encouraging daily use is potentially dangerous and habit-forming.)It turns out Gudtrip agreed. When I asked Gudtrip what the vape actually does, how the rewards work, and how the company responds to criticism that it is encouraging people to consume cannabis for crypto, Gudtrip’s CTO, Rishi Kommuri, emailed back a few numbered paragraphs. The line that stood out to me most: “it is actually illegal to offer financial incentives per consumption type and so on in any way.”Wait, what?Despite what Gudtrip’s website, X account, Threads account, TikTok account, and a giant banner in NUG Cannabis Dispensary promised, Kommuri was now claiming that the vape did not give you Bitcoin for vaping.“The Bitcoin reward is decoupled from consumption,” he wrote. “It is paid upfront on activation, to every customer, and does not scale with puff duration, session count, daily use, or streaks. A customer who never uses the device after activation receives the same reward 2$-60$ BTC equivalent reward as one who uses it regularly. This is a standard consumer loyalty mechanic — Bitcoin in place of points — and Bitcoin is a commodity under SEC and CFTC classification. We’re confident the structure complies with the cannabis regulations of every market we operate in.”So, you don’t actually “Earn Bitcoin from every single puff”? A video on the company’s website states “every inhale syncs with your phone and earns bitcoin and gudtrip points in real time” — but it does not actually do that? Because that would be illegal?Gudtrip’s app only made the situation more confusing. When a colleague went to download it via the QR-coded on the poster at NUG Oakland dispensary (it was offered via TestFlight, rather than Apple’s App Store), the download page promised something else. The preview screenshot clearly stated that the app rewards puffs on the vape — not with crypto, but with Gudtrip Points. What were Gudtrip Points? What could they be redeemed for? We reached out to Gudtrip again to clarify.A second email from Kommuri reiterated, with some urgency: “The main point we want to make sure was clear is that Gudtrip’s Bitcoin reward is tied to activation, not consumption.” And again, you do not get rewarded for puffs! “Gudtrip Points are a separate, non-monetary loyalty system tracked in-app. They are not blockchain rewards and are not redeemable for cash, cryptocurrency, or cannabis products.”The contradictions were piling up.Kommuri had an explanation for this: “The per-puff points displayed in that screenshot was a legacy feature carried from our other smart hardware products … this is no longer a feature we currently provide.” And those “ongoing crypto rewards over time”? Well, that “refers to our future portfolio management feature in the app.” Yes, the app is also meant to offer investment planning for your crypto portfolio.So, the per-puff points system is a defunct legacy feature, and the crypto portfolio-managing agentic AI doesn’t actually exist yet. What does this actually do again, besides the obvious?The only way to find out what the vape actually did was to finally use it. However, our ethics policy forbids us from individually owning cryptocurrency, so we registered a throwaway account for the Bitcoin. And our legal team discourages us from writing about questionably legal drug usage, so we also ordered an auto fluid extractor pump to simulate puffing the vape.Upon linking the vape to Gudtrip’s app, we were rewarded with $2 worth of Bitcoin. So far, so good. But would there be more as we vaped?As another colleague pumped the vape into the extractor, the arced progress bar within the app filled up. Points were tabulated. He’d pumped beyond the 20 seconds of daily toking that was “recommended” for our “health,” but no Bitcoin was dispersed beyond the initial amount. There are separate, dedicated app pages to keep track of your current prize value and your toke-accumulation history, but to get another $2–$60 in Bitcoin, you would need to purchase a new, disposable $67 vape. That’s how they get you.Meanwhile, as we emailed back and forth with Kommuri, several social media posts appeared to vanish from Gudtrip’s accounts, though it’s not clear what posts may have been removed or why. Indexed posts on Google — which, when clicked, say the posts aren’t available — suggest one was a TikTok video that used the wording “Invest while you puff,” while another was for an Instagram post with the phrase “Every hit earns crypto.”A look at the Wayback Machine reveals that Gudtrip also changed its website to weaken the connection between smoking and earning crypto. A snapshot from mid-April shows an image of a phone with the Gudtrip app open, with “every hit earns crypto” prominently displayed beneath the company logo. Today, the phone with the app is still there, but the space underneath the logo is blank. It sure seems that the company is trying to fade out the original idea — toke to get Bitcoin, or sorry, toke and get Bitcoin?So after all of that, my question was answered: The vape was real. But you will not, in fact, get Bitcoin with every hit.Additional reporting by Sean Hollister.Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Robert Hart