Dive Brief:

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, grilled the founder and CEO of Beast Industries over their plans for fintech app Step, which the company bought last month, saying Beast Industries’ corporate history “raises concerns about its ability to manage a financial technology company, particularly one targeting children and teens.” 
• In a Monday letter to Jimmy Donaldson – aka MrBeast – and company CEO Jeff Housenbold, Warren requested detailed information on the company’s plans related to cryptocurrency and non-fungible token trading and holding, changes the company intends to make to Step and how Beast Industries has “professionalized” its operations in the past two years.
• “Beast Industries is primarily an entertainment and consumer product company – and any foray into financial services, particularly services aimed at children – must be done with great care and in compliance with the law,” said Warren, the Senate Banking Committee’s ranking member.

Dive Insight:

Last month, Beast Industries, the company owned by YouTuber MrBeast, said it had acquired Step, a fintech app geared toward teens, for an undisclosed amount. Step, which says it has about 7 million customers, bills itself as “banking for the next generation.”

“Nobody taught me about investing, building credit or managing money when I was growing up,” Donaldson, 27, said in a post on X when the deal was announced. “That’s exactly why we’re joining forces with Step. I want to give millions of young people the financial foundation I never had.”

In her letter, Warren asked a number of questions to get a sense of what that will look like.

“Paired with Mr. Donaldson’s very loyal following of children and teenagers, it is likely that many young people will trust Step with their funds, savings and financial futures,” she wrote.

A Beast Industries spokesperson said Tuesday the company’s “primary motivation behind this deal is to improve the financial future of the next generation.”

“Now that we’ve completed the transaction and have ownership control, we’re examining all existing offerings and marketing approaches to ensure that Step’s future is developed thoughtfully and deliberately, meets our very high quality standards, and is in compliance with applicable laws and regulatory requirements,” the spokesperson said.

In 2022, Step allowed teens to buy and sell cryptocurrency through a partnership with Zerohash, and it published videos geared toward teens about investing in crypto and digital assets. Videos were titled “How People are Making Millions Off NFTs” and “3 Facts About Bitcoin That You Didn’t Know.” 

In videos published in late 2022, the fintech encouraged teens to talk with their parents about crypto investing, even including specific scripts children could use in an effort to convince skeptical parents, Warren said.

Viewers were advised “to go ‘in for the kill’ and suggest starting with a small investment.” 

The speaker “advises the viewer that parents ‘will appreciate’ hearing their child tell them they will only invest money ‘[they] are willing to lose’ and hearing their child explain why they are interested in such investments, for which the speaker provides a list of stock answers,” such as “I have done my research,” and “I have been saving my money,” Warren’s letter said.

The speaker told teen viewers to “throw in something relatable like, ‘Mom, you’ve had Apple stock forever, Bitcoin has just as much potential.’”

With that move, Step “undercut its own credibility by going around kids’ parents and directly coaching minors,” Warren wrote.

Step later referred to non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies as “extremely risky, extremely volatile” and warned that “it is easy to get wrecked” when investing in them; it also called NFTs “high risk” and “full of scams.” In 2024, the company quietly dropped the crypto trading option.

But Beast Industries has signaled plans to move into crypto and decentralized finance, and the company has a history of targeting children and teens with its Feastables chocolate bars, lunch kits and toys, Warren noted. 

Donaldson’s MrBeast YouTube channel has 471 million subscribers. About 39% of his viewers were between the ages of 13 and 17, and the vast majority were younger than 25 years old, as of April 2025. 

Donaldson “has been accused of publishing ads that were potentially misleading to child viewers, and may have collected personal information about children without their parents[’] consent,” Warren wrote. 

She also noted a Beast Industries employee recently being reported for insider trading, and cited allegations of Donaldson’s own “unethical and potentially illegal behavior related to his dealings in cryptocurrencies.”

Just before the Step purchase, in January, Beast Industries snagged a $200 million investment from Bitmine Immersion Technologies, an Ethereum treasury company. Housenbold, at that time, said Beast Industries looked forward “to exploring ways to … incorporate DeFi into our upcoming financial services platform.”

And when the company filed for the trademark “MrBeast Financial,” it expressed intent to provide cryptocurrency trading services, crypto payment processing and crypto trading through decentralized exchanges, in addition to online banking, cash advance and investment advisory services and credit and debit card issuance. 

Warren also said she is troubled by Step’s banking partnership with Evolve Bank & Trust, a lender entangled in the 2024 collapse of middleware fintech Synapse, which resulted in the loss of close to $100 million in consumer deposits. 

That same year, West Memphis, Arkansas-based Evolve was hit with a Federal Reserve enforcement action, and the bank was affected by a cyberattack that saw customer data released to the dark web.     

“Given that Step’s products are aimed at children and young adults, Evolve likely has extensive amounts of sensitive information about minors that must be protected from further attacks,” the senator said. 

Warren probed Donaldson and Housenbold on their plans to advertise and grow the fintech app’s user base, whether they’ll release content that encourages minors to convince their parents to let them invest in crypto and how Beast Industries will protect users’ funds if liquidity concerns arise.

Warren requested answers to her questions by April 3.

“We appreciate Senator Warren’s outreach and look forward to engaging with her as we build the next phase of the Step financial platform,” the Beast Industries spokesperson said.