Crypto whiz Justin Sun ran a hook-up app before $4.6m Warren Buffett lunch bid

Before hogging headlines for missing a US$4.6 million lunch with Warren Buffett, cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun Yuchen was known for creating voice live-streaming app Peiwo, which has pushed the boundaries of social networking in China.

Photo credit: Shao-Chun Wang / 123RF

Peiwo, which translates as “accompany me” in English, was released in 2014 and targeted millennials. The app would connect like-minded users via live audio chats based on 10-second voice samples they recorded on the platform.

Unlike popular social media-turned-hook-up apps Momo and Tantan on which users posted photos, Peiwo was designed to minimize judgment or attraction to make friends based only on appearance. It encouraged users to communicate their thoughts through their voices.

Users are automatically connected with random strangers because the app has the microphone on a user’s smartphone open by default. If connected users do not want to add each other as friends, they can swipe off that link from their screen and never be seen again.

The app’s users were mainly between the ages of 16 and 25, according to a Peiwo press release last year. It said there were more than 10 million registered users around the world, with a monthly active user base of more than 1 million.

Usage had expanded outside China, with subscribers located in North America, Western Europe, and Asia-Pacific countries like Japan and South Korea.

The world has become smaller thanks to the wide popularity of China’s self-developed social media apps, including Tencent Holdings-owned WeChat and ByteDance’s TikTok – known as Weixin and Duoyin respectively on the Chinese mainland.

Peiwo, however, is facing challenges that threaten its longevity in China’s highly competitive apps market, as the government continues its crackdown against online content that “disrupts socialist values.”

The platform has long been criticized for its content, with the state-backed Xinhua news agency reporting last year that users of the app shared vulgar and pornographic content.

Some users on Peiwo were live-streaming to more than 3,000 people at a time, engaging in flirtatious banter to encourage their followers to buy them gifts in exchange for more explicit adult content, according to Xinhua, which claimed that some popular broadcasters earn more than 1,000 yuan (US$145) from a few minutes of live-streamed audio.

The fortunes of Peiwo took a turn for the worse this month when it was taken down from Apple’s App Store and various popular Android mobile app stores in China because of complaints about the platform’s content.

Sun indicated in a Sina Weibo post on Wednesday that operations of the app remain normal, despite those takedowns. He said Peiwo was “cooperating with the regulatory agency to carry out content clean-up,” according to his Weibo post.

The takedown of Peiwo came in the same week that Sun postponed his lunch with Berkshire Hathaway chairman Buffett because of kidney stones and publicly apologized for “overhyping” that event. The 20th-anniversary charity lunch hosted by Buffett was originally scheduled for July 25.