From Vtuber Pioneer to Crypto Scam: The Disappearance of Rin Asobi

0:00 Before Holo Liveen, before V Shojo, before Niji Sanji, before any VTubers were mainstream, Rita Zobi was already here. A bilingual performer, genuinely talented, beaming herself into Hollywood as a hologram in 2019. While most people still had no idea what a VTuber was, she was one of the first to bridge Japan and the English market. She made what is V tubing today and she was beloved by thousands. And then one day in 2021 after a co charity project went wrong, she was just gone overnight with no warning, no goodbye while the industry

0:45 mourned her. Fans were left completely in the dark, worrying about her, wondering what happened and getting no answers for years. The story behind her disappearance is messy, sad, and genuinely infuriating. But nothing about it is as infuriating as what came after. Because finally today, we have the answer to her disappearance. Renzobie was scammed. And then 5 years later, Renzobie returned as the scam in a way that no one ever expected. But first, a quick word from our sponsor, Raycon. Look, being a horse in a human world comes with a lot of

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3:04 Renazobi debuted in late 2018, which in Vtuber years is basically the stone age. Poloen didn't exist yet. Bishojo didn't exist. The entire English-speaking side of this industry was still a handful of independent creators and a few Western fans squinting at translated Japanese content trying to figure out what they were looking at. The concept of a virtual YouTuber, a real human performer giving life to an animated avatar, hadn't even broken through the mainstream western audiences yet. Vubing was still considered this weird niche hobby that a small segment of anime fans wanted to partake in. Renaobie arrived at the intersection of all of that. She

3:49 introduced herself as the world's first Japanese American virtual girl from Los Angeles. And from day one, her whole identity was built around being this bridge. not just between two languages, but between two cultures that were desperately curious about each other and had very few entry points. She taught her audience Japanese slangs, words like yabby, which depending on context, can mean anything from that's crazy to oh no to that's bad. She'd compare how American and Japanese shop clerks behave differently. Why certain social norms feel jarring when you move between the two cultures. For a whole generation of Western anime fans who were deeply curious about Japanese culture but had no real entry point, Ren was the door

4:36 and she could actually sing. Acoustic guitar on stream, traditional Japanese shmeisen, a voice that stopped people miscroll. She also knew exactly where her audience already was and went to meet them there. For a huge portion of the English-speaking VTuber community, their very first introduction to the entire concept was a BeatSaber battle between Noble and this bilingual virtual girl. Then there was Deep Pitty, not to be confused with the Diddler. No, we're talking about the famous YouTube Deadpool cosplayer here, showing up to take over her channel, which introduced her to a completely different pocket of internet culture. Her real world content pulled even bigger numbers. Her most viewed video is just her interacting

5:22 with people from the real world. Right after her debut, she was already appearing on a Japanese internet program alongside creators with a combined audience of over 10 million subscribers. Those videos were pulling hundreds of thousands of views. The collaboration kept coming from every direction. By 2020, she had somewhere around between 70,000 to 100,000 subscribers. Modest by today's standards, of course, but significant enough at the time to rival mid-tier Japanese creators in an era when the Japanese side of this industry was enormously more developed than the Western side, mind you. Basically, back then, it was a huge feat for an English VTuber to even reach those numbers. Ren

6:08 was becoming a bigger and bigger deal. But what set Ren apart from a lot of creators at her level was that she didn't just build an audience and move on. She was genuinely embedded in the community that she was helping create. She ran Discord servers specifically to connect smaller international YouTubers with each other. She gave them visibility, gave them a space. She was a founding member of Universals, one of the earliest attempt to build a proper network for international creators to grow together. She showed up for people who had nothing to offer her in return. The people around her called her a sweetheart. The fans treated her like she was something precious. And honestly, she was. Not just because of

6:53 the talent, but because she understood that Vtubing was only going to become something real if the people inside it took care of each other. Ren wasn't just building a career. She was tending to something she genuinely believed in. And then in 2019, she beamed herself into Hollywood. the 45th annual Saturn Awards, the Avalon Theater using a brand new holortasian technology called Holo Portal, the world's first single passenger hologram machine. And Ren's avatar was transmitted live from Tokyo to a room full of Hollywood celebrities in 4K resolution. She stood on that stage alongside Kizuna Iro Kaguya Luna,

7:39 and Shiraakami Fubuki. If those names don't mean anything to you yet, just know that in the world of Vtubing, they are the founding legends, the people who built the genre from nothing. And Ren was standing amongst them in Hollywood as a hologram, representing the English-speaking side of an industry that had barely existed 2 years earlier. And by late 2020, she was appearing on digital panels inside Tokyo metro stations as virtual weather anchor. The trajectory was undeniable. Renazobi had everything to become a living legend. However, Ren wasn't an indie VTuber and unlike the massive corporations running the industry today like Holo Live or Niji Sanji, her IB was owned by a

8:26 smaller company called Animal Studio, a subsidiary of a media agency called Yas Media Agency run by a CEO named Yuki Seki. The character design, the branding, the channels, all of it belonged to the company. They hired a performer to be the soul inside her avatar. Something similar to Kizuno Eyes's original setup, if you're familiar with it. It was corporateowned. The talent was hired. The structure gave Ren access to resources and opportunities an indie creator couldn't have pulled off alone. the Saturn Awards hologram, the mainstream Japanese TV appearances, the professional production pipeline. It's what made her rise so fast. But it's also what made everything that came next so devastated. In 2020,

9:11 the world had just shut down. Co hit everybody differently, but it hit the entertainment industry like a freight train. Live events canled, studios closed, the entire infrastructure of public-f facing media grinding to a halt overnight. For a virtual YouTuber though, someone who had already existed entirely online, who had built her whole brand around bridging two culture through a screen, it could have been a moment. While the rest of the world was scrambling to figure out how to turn their physical operations into digital ones, Ren was arguably better positioned than almost anyone to keep going. If Ren and her company played their cards right in this very moment, this could be an incredible opportunity. And that's when

9:57 Yuki had an idea. Yukieki, the CEO of YS Media, the people who own Ren's IP, may I remind you. And what was his great idea? His great idea was Operation Tomodachi, a charity initiative built around Ren's brand. They would manufacture and sell Renobi branded hand sanitizer and donate the profits to pandemic relief funds. Think about it for a second. Rinse face plastered on thousands of bottle of hand sanitizer. Something to brighten your day in the bleakest possible environment while actually helping people who needed it. It was genuinely clever. A virtual idol as a vehicle for realworld relief during a global crisis. What could possibly go

10:44 wrong? And to be fair to them, for a moment it worked. They donated 30,000 bottles to the cities of Long Beach, Glendale, and Los Angeles. They partnered with legitimate organizations, got Nepon Express to transport pallets of supplies for free, and donated hundreds of thousands of masks across Japan. Yukieki's idea was to expand the whole thing into a larger relief fund eventually, and manufacturing pandemic supplies, donating food, and creating jobs. It really started as a genuine goodwill initiative. Well, at least initially. But before we even get to where it all collapsed, we need to go back 1 month before Operation Tomodachi existed because the disaster actually started earlier than anyone realized. In

11:32 March 2020, Yuki needed money desperately. YS Media Ren's company was stretched in and he needed to make payroll. So, he took out $100,000 short-term loan from a man named Harris Soleni, promising to pay it back by late June. He told Seni that YS Media was expecting a large royalty payout from Sony Entertainment around that time. Fine, normal enough. Loans happen all the time in business. Then in April, one month later, YS Media launched Operation Tomodachi and struck a deal with a wholesale distribution company called LNS Brother to manufacture the 1 million bottles of hand sanitizer that would be needed for the project. YS Media paid

12:18 them a $550,000 deposit. Here's the thing, though. Paris Soleni, the man who had just loaned them $100,000 30 days earlier, was also a member and owner of Villainous Brothers LLC. The man they borrowed money from was the same man they had just handed half a million dollars to. Whether that was naive or something worse is a question the courts never fully answered. What happened next wasn't ambiguous, though. LNS brothers was supposed to deliver the first batch of hand sanitizers by May 21st. They never did. By June 5th, YS Media had received only 43,000 bottles out of the 1 million

13:06 they'd ordered and paid for. And the ones they did receive were defective. Some even had faulty barcodes, rendering them essentially useless for distribution. half a million dollars and they got back a fraction of what they were promised broken. So Yuki did what anyone might do when they realized that the person who just scammed them out of half a million dollar is also the person they owed them $100,000, not pay them back. On June 26, he told Seni that YS Media had no intention of repaying the loan. A few days later, they sent a formal demand letter to the LNS brothers trying to cancel the agreement and claw back their $550,000 deposit. Both sides end up suing each

13:53 other. YS Media went after LNS brothers for the $550,000 deposit while Sanki went after YS Media for the unpaid $100,000 loan. Following me? two lawsuits, both extremely messy, both expensive, and they dragged on for years, while the company was hemorrhaging money it no longer had. In the midst of all of this, on February 3rd 2021 Renazobi posted for the last time. She tweeted a few days before that her website was under maintenance, that streaming would be back to normal next week, that she couldn't wait to see everyone, and then nothing. The channel just went dark. She disappeared without

14:40 an explanation. There was no graduation stream as there usually are when a VTuber leaves. There was no farewell video, no message to the people who had been watching her for years. She was just gone. Fans had no idea what was happening. There was three months of silence, then six. People started posting. Anyone know what happened to Renosobi? It seems like she hasn't uploaded in quite a while. Same thing with her Instagram and Twitter. Does anyone know what happened? Nobody had answers because nobody give them any. It wasn't until March 25th, 2021, nearly 2 months after she disappeared, that Animal Studio finally surfaced in their Discord. Hi everyone. I was terribly

15:27 sorry that I made you guys worry. To explain the current situation, we have been scammed by Operation Tomodachi donation project and have suffered a big deal of damage which has turned into a legal issue. We are working hard to get Renzobie back on board so please be patient. So fans waited. They had an explanation now. Sort of a scam, legal issues. Renazobi would be back though. Please be patient. And then January 2022 arrived and Yuki posted a much longer message. He introduced himself as a Japanese leader of the Renazobi project. He said he'd been checking everyone's warm comments and was always encouraged. He said he was still alive and had no intention of giving up. And then buried in the middle of this message, "I'm also

16:14 $3 million in debt. This is the truth. And while we can't restart the project soon," he asked for their support. And he signed, "Kind regards, Yuki Seki. $3 million from a hand sanitizer charity project." Now, you might be wondering how $650,000 turns into a $3 million debt. The $550,000 was just the initial deposit. The full contract though was worth $1.5 million. That also already secured a buyer for all those sanitizers and this was revenue that evaporated the moment LNS brothers failed to deliver. Add years of legal fees compounding interest on the unpaid loan, right? And the cost of

17:00 keeping a paralyzed company afloat. It cascaded very very fast. Well, according to Yuki, anyway, fans now knew the scale of what had happened, but Ren's status was still technically unresolved. She could still come back. Yuki had assured them he had no intention of giving up. So, fans kept waiting. Then, October 14th, 2022 comes around. Animal Studio posted again. Hello, it's been a while. I have a question for you guys. This long period of time has passed. The original voice actors may not return in the future. I want to make sure that it is because you are all here. Would you guys still like to see content? That was it. There was still no apology or explanation of what happened to her.

17:45 There was no acknowledgement of what she had given to this project or what she deserved after years of building it. There was just a question. Would you still watch if you replaced her? The community then made their feelings clear. If there was going to be a new voice actress, there needed to be a completely different look to go with it. You can't just put a new person inside the same face and pretend that nothing changed. The fans were definitely against that. But went quiet again. 7 months later, in May 2023, they posted an unlisted video to Ren's YouTube channel showing what appeared to be a new model and a new outfit. Everyone thought, "Okay, they're updating her looks. The model is still here, so the

18:31 original voice actress must still be involved, right?" On the same day, the Renobi Twitter account posted a feeling of revival. And then a few days later, Animal reminded people to go check the unlisted video, teasing that the new Renobi was expected to go beyond the boundaries of traditional VTubers and become something entirely new. whatever that meant. Please wait with anticipation, they said. The only other sign of life from the account during those years was strange. A Reddit user noticed that the Renzobie Twitter account, supposedly dormant, was still liking a stream of AI generated images from a single user. Nobody knew what to make of it at the time, but it would make a lot more sense later. Meanwhile,

19:16 the lawsuits were going nowhere. And this is my own deduction from reading through the court filings, but it's almost as if they ran out of money midway through their own legal battle. It was so odd. A corporate media agency at some point stopped getting lawyer representation. And then they eventually just stopped showing up at all. By 2024, their scheduled jury trial was vacated. And by late 2025, a default judgment was entered against them in Senkei's loan case. The court ruled that they owed him the full $100,000 plus accumulated interest and legal fees because no one showed up to argue otherwise. Not only had they been

20:01 defrauded out of their half a million dollar deposit, they were now legally obligated to pay back their loan to the very people who had allegedly defrauded them. They were cooked. Now, through all of this, the scam, the lawsuits, the $3 million hole, there was someone who had legitimately nothing to do with any of it. Ren Renazobi's original voice actress was the only public-f facing element of this entire operation. Yuki, Animal Studio, YS Media Agency, the names that had caused this entire mess were all anonymous entities who didn't have to answer to anyone except their investors. But the performer, she had a

20:48 face, she had a community, she had a branding. She was the one who had stood in front of hundreds of thousands of fans and personally promoted Operation Tomodachi when the project collapsed into a fraud controversy. She was the one left holding it while everyone demanded answers. She became publicly entangled in a disaster she hadn't created. and the name Renzobie became synonymous with a charity scam and a product that was never delivered to its consumers. On top of that, Renzobi wasn't YS Media's only asset. They actually run multiple business and divisions simultaneously. Sure, Ren was their flagship talent, but she wasn't a

21:34 whole company. So when the depth hit and the legal battles paralyzed Animal Studios production capabilities, the people running those other divisions could quietly regroup. But Ren, the performer whose face was tied to a public controversy, a lawsuit, and a major backlash, could not. She had gone from asset to liability overnight, and the company did what companies do. They prioritized survivability and profit over her and threw her under the bus. They just shuttered her channel, cut her loose, and left her with no platform to defend herself. No statement from the company shielding her at all. Nothing. Just silence while the questions piled up. The trauma of it was enough that she

22:20 didn't just leave Animal Studio. She left Vtubing entirely. The fans who called her an angel, the character she'd given everything to, the community she'd spent years tending to, all of it gone. The Renaobi brand entered a state of hibernation. The VTuber landscape, meanwhile, underwent massive shifts. The rise and fall of Vojo, the dominance of Allive and Niji Sanji, the emergence of independent mega stars, the ecosystem Ren had helped plant seeds for in 2018 when it was still a weird niche hobby had become a fullblown industry with millions of viewers, dedicated fan base, sold out concerts, and mainstream media

23:06 coverage. The thing she'd believe in before most people knew what to call it had become real. She just wasn't there to see any of it. January 26, 2026. 5 years of silence. And then out of nowhere, the Renazobi account posted a YouTube short. There was no announcement and no context to go with it. It was just Ren hunch over herself, repeating, >> "It's dark. It's cold. I'm scared." >> The VTuber community lost their minds. Threads exploded. Was this her return? Was the queen back? Someone even joked that she finally remembered her password. There was genuine excitement

23:52 there, the kind that only builds up after years of unanswered questions. And look, I get it. After everything that happened to her, the idea of Ren coming back felt like it could mean something. Like maybe everything that was wrong could be made right. But something about it felt slightly off from the start. 3 days later, she tweeted for the first time in 5 years a closeup of her face and the caption said, "Where am I?" And then silence again. A month later, February 11th, still here, I hear voices, distant, familiar. How long was I? And then quiet again until March 5th when something shifted. This tweet was

24:39 different. She was tagging someone, someone called producer Y. Fans immediately went looking for this producer Y account and it had one line in the bio that explained everything and nothing at the same time. I lost everything to a scam 5 years ago. Left her locked in a folder. Now I'm back. Project reclaim. The scam reference was clearly Operation Tomodachi. So this was someone from inside the original project. Someone claiming to be her producer riser facing after five years to bring her back. The page was almost empty, save for one tweet that read, "I locked her away. I will tell you everything." Finally, fans thought

25:25 answers, but then they kept scrolling and what they found on that page set off all kinds of alarm bells immediately. There was six AI generated animated shorts posted to build hype around her return. But in an industry built on the backs of human illustrators and riggers, people who are deeply respectful for their craft and who are considered essential to what makes a VTuber feel real, the producer of a beloved pioneer had come back with generative AI and called it a revival. The community did not receive this well. One still image from the clips was flagged immediately and went around the internet. A teacup of a soda can pull tab on top of it. a classic AI hallucination that fans mocked and screenshotted. It just felt

26:12 so sloppy, like whoever was behind this hadn't even bothered to look at what they were posting. And then on March 2nd, Animal Studio posted in their basically inactive Discord server up until this point, asking for a little bit more patient please from fans. Something new was coming. Renosobi had always been slightly ahead of her time, and this step would be no different. And then all the warning signs got buried for a moment on March 16 when producer Y dropped what seemed like genuinely good news. Reno Zobie was coming back. And not only that, she was releasing her first ever original song. This is the time fans were going to hear her voice again. The voice that people had called

26:58 Angelic that had made strangers on the internet cry in a good way. 2 days later, March 18, Ren tweeted and posted a snippet of her song. And then on the exact same day, producer Y posted the announcement that changed everything. He acknowledged the AI generation animation. Yes, they knew. And yes, it was intentional. And yes, there was a reason for it. And then he got to the reason. They were launching a cryptocurrency token called Asby. He anticipated the backlash and tried to get ahead of it. What a token? So, this is just about making money, right? I understand why you would think that. Honestly, if I were in your position, I would probably feel the same way. But

27:44 then he laid out all the tokconomics behind it. He explained that the liquidity pool was burned and locked that even he couldn't access it and that team's tokens were locked for 6 months. And then buried in the middle of that long Twitter post was his actual plan. Token holders would vote on who becomes Ren's new voice actress. Wait, hold on. What? What do you mean pick Ren's new voice actress? You mean it won't be the same voice actress that's played Ren this entire time? In Vtuber culture, there's a word for this. Skinwalking. When a corporation takes the avatar of a beloved character and puts a completely different human being inside it, fans

28:29 don't connect with the avatar. They connect with the person performing it. The model is just a face. The performer is the soul. Take out the soul and put someone else in. That's not really a revival, is it? That's just a costume. and the community that had spent 5 years asking if the person behind Renzobie was okay had absolutely no interest in buying a costume. Fans were devastated and then they looked at the website. The manifesto opened with a bold claim. Ren is not a character owned by a company. She is the world's first communityowned VTuber IP. her voice, her story, her universe, all shaped by the people who

29:15 believe in her. Except that wasn't particularly true, was it? Reno Zobie's IP has always been owned by Animal Studio, a subsidiary of YS Media Agency run by Yuki Seki. The ownership structure never changed. It was the same in 2018 when she debuted and the same in 2021 when they threw her performer out. And if you put that website into the wayback machine, you understand why this is all just a cover up. Vtuber Studio.com had previously belonged to Animal Studio, the exact same URL. It's the exact same company and the exact same people. It was just repackaged with a crypto label on it. The road map also

30:00 told us the rest of the story. The pitch was simple. Buy the Asby token and you get a say in Ren's future. Who voices her? What music she'll make? Where the character goes? On paper, it sounds like the ultimate fan dream, right? Finally owning a piece of something you love. But in reality, Ren's actual community, the people who had spent 5 years supporting her, watching her videos, or asking if she was okay, didn't automatically get anything. You had to pay for a vote. And that was the hook designed to get fan to open their wallets and lure them in. And the worst part of all, they were using her unreleased song to sell it. Because according to some fans speculating

30:47 online, this is the time was actually the only original vocal recording the original voice actress had ever made. Recorded before everything collapsed and was never released. and it was now the marketing material for a crypto token designed to fund her own replacement. It was like a slap in the face. Her voice, her labor, her art, all used to erase her. And then on March 19th, the day after Ren had posted her song snippet and fans were at peak excitement, Animal Studio made their move. While announcing the Asby token to the community, they thanked longtime supporters and offered free tokens to early believers to sweeten the deal. And then methodically,

31:34 they walked fans through how to set up a crypto wallet step by step. Some of you may not be familiar with how this worked. They said, "That's okay. We'll explain everything. Just share your public wallet address." The timing was, of course, deliberate. dropped the crypto announcement at the exact moment fans excitement was at its highest and then immediately guide people who had never touched cryptocurrency before through the process of getting their wallets ready. And then a fan asked the question on everyone's lips. Other than being a glorified GoFundMe, why make a cryptocurrency? And if it's just to raise funds for the project, why was this your first option presented to us fans? especially given the less than stellar reputation of cryptocurrency

32:20 here in the west. Animal's response was entirely unconvincing. A GoFundMe couldn't give fans a real voice. They said asby holders would vote on who becomes Ren's new voice actress. They'd been burned themselves by a scam once before. That's exactly why they'd built this to be as transparent as possible. Our goal is simple. To bring Ren back properly. The community was not moved. This wasn't the same VTuber fan base from 2018. Five years of corporate failures and broken promises had produced a community that knew exactly what to look for. Reddit threads were pulling the project apart within hours. People in the industry, myself included, were publicly flagging it as a scam and

33:07 spreading awareness. And while Reddit and Twitter were pulling the whole thing apart in real time and getting suspicious of them, fans on YouTube had no idea any of this was happening. Look at the comment section under her return shorts, for example. Is this the real Oobie? And then someone tries to warn them. Her channel got hacked and this is a crypto rugpool. Her return has been AI. Very sad. And then other fans asking skeptically, proof or can you tell me more? Because they generally can't believe it. These people had been waiting years for her and then finally seeing movement on her account. They were just completely unprepared for what it actually was. The comment sections tells you everything about who this was specifically designed to target.

33:52 Finally, launch day came. The token launched on March 20th, and for a brief moment, the chart actually moved. The market cap spiked to around $15,000 at launch. someone had bought in. The price jumped and for a few minutes it looked like it might have legs, but it didn't. If you look at the tokconomics for more than 30 seconds, it wasn't hard to see why. Only about 20% of the total token supply was ever going to be available for the public to actually buy. The other 80% was sitting in wallets controlled probably by the team, locked away under different labels, but ultimately theirs to do with as they pleased. So, the play was simple. Get enough fans excited to buy into that 20%, drive the price up, and then let

34:40 the team cash out their 80% once it peaked. The chart at launch told you everything. A spike to around $50,000 market cap and then an immediate freefall as the early buyer sold and nobody replaced them. By March 23rd, producer Weisser fisted in the official Asby Telegram to do damage control. The launch chart was hit by sniper bots. He claimed automated programs that target new Solana pools. Nothing to do with the community rejecting the project. The top 10 wallets holding 98% of the supply were just the standard tokconomics allocations. Perfectly normal. And as for the dead launch with no traction, that was actually by design. He hadn't

35:27 paid any KO promoters. That's key opinion leaders. Basically paid crypto influencers hired to shill a token to their followers to drum up artificial hype. That was a feature, not a bug, which is an interesting thing to say when you've just spent two months using Rena Zobie, a beloved pioneer's 5 years absence in her unreleased song and her grieving fan base as your entire marketing strategy. The ASBY token page also tweeted the same thing. It was only sniper bots, right? And then someone looked at the official ASB Telegram chat itself. Right at the same time, if you looked at the ASB Telegram chat itself, right there in the group, there's a co-founder that was actively messaging and asking people who to contact for

36:13 MAS, long-term partnerships, and 100 KO channel promotions right next to the spam bots pushing unrelated airdrops. By March 27, the coin had bled down to $955 in liquidity and a $1.4,000 market cap. Zero buys and a handful of sales. The chart was a flatline with a tombstone at the start. The chart was in freef fall. The ground had shifted and they knew it. The team needed to pivot their strategy. So on March 23rd, producer Y posted on Twitter, "To be honest, we didn't expect this level of disconnect in how things would be received. We're going to take a step back to rethink how we communicate

36:59 and move forward." Suddenly, Ren was just never a character. Suddenly, the person behind her was what made her special. Suddenly, nothing had been finalized, and they weren't here to erase the past. The recasting, they built an entire token around the global edition show. They wanted to build vote for your new ren everything. It was now something that needed more time to communicate clearly. But in their telegram group, they're still talking about crypto. In the end, the community was left with more questions than answers. Beyond the court filings, Animal Studio never properly explained what happened. There was no transparency nor accountability, nothing. People have even speculated that maybe YS Media were the ones running the scam themselves.

37:44 that the whole operation toodachi story was more complicated that they led on. And honestly, given everything that we've seen from this company, it's not an unreasonable thing to wonder. Then there's producer Y. Who is he really? He claims to be her original producer. He's using the same website that belonged to Animal Studio. and his story of losing everything to a scam five years ago matches Yuki Seki's 2022 Discord confession almost word for word. The evidence points in one direction, but of course I can't prove it yet. What I can say is that this whole thing feels deliberately shrouded in mystery, and at this point that feels intentional. The community saw through it fast enough that the damage was minimal. The coin

38:31 barely scrapping $1,000 in liquidity before flatlining. But what if it hadn't? If the nostalgia had been strong enough, her voice, her name, and her allegedly unreleased song would have been the vehicle for something that had nothing to do with her. Something the Ren Aobie legacy would have never stood for. She came into this industry as one of the first. She helped build something she genuinely believed in for people who genuinely loved her. She deserved to leave on her own terms, not as a soulless product. She didn't get that. and what came back in 2026 had her face and her name and yet none of the things that made her real. The fans who had spent 5 years asking if she was okay knew it the moment they saw it. The

39:17 person behind the model is the VTuber. And yet some companies seem to still be learning that in 2020 the world had just shut down. Co hit everybody differently, but it hit the entertainment industry like a freight train. Wait, is that how I pronounce this? >> Freight train. >> Oh, freight train. Co hit everybody differently, but it hit the entertainment industry like a freight train. >> Freight train. >> Freight train. Ren was arguably pos Ren was arguably better positioned than almost anyone to keep going. >> Welcome to How to Pronounce. In today's video, we'll be focusing into

40:04 altogether LLC. Some even had faulty barcodes making some even had fa you might now you might be wondering how a six Now you might be wondering how 6 Now you might be wondering how 650,000 Now you might be wondering how six so bad with numbers I'm going to redo this paragraph the producer of whatever weirdness had surrounded did her return. Whatever weirdness had surrounded her return, that but then he laid out all the the sub a sub a subsidi

40:51 it by March 27 the coin by March 27th the coin had bled down to 950 t the coin had 31 holders and they were backpedaling at Whoops. I needed to say this first.