westcol ate spicy food in chongqing and went viral. again. in china. can he please just be normal
while the timeline was busy tracking the despechado arc, this man quietly became an international export. a binance deal. a china trip. drones. the lore grows.
westcol is not having a crisis. westcol is having a global expansion.
while everyone including this website was chronicling the despechado era and the aida merlano split and the joint content and the jokes and all of it, the actual story is that this colombian streamer quietly signed a binance affiliate deal, flew to chongqing, ate something reportedly very spicy on camera, involved drones somehow, and went viral in china. chat, is this real.
per iChongqing's coverage from april, the trip hit. the kind of hit where people who have never heard of kick colombia are now watching a clip of a man crying through malatang. that's reach. that's a different category of streamer behavior.
and the binance thing from early 2025 matters more in retrospect than it did at the time. crypto affiliate deals are a dime a dozen in this space but westcol is already top 10 on kick globally, already got a latin grammy nomination, already pulled 4.6 million concurrent for stream fighters 4. adding an international financial brand deal to that profile is not a coincidence, it is a strategy.
the funny thing is none of this was the story. the story was supposed to be the boxing loss, then the grammy, then the breakup. and underneath all of it this guy was apparently out here filming drone footage over chongqing and getting written up in english-language chinese media.
the economist noticed him because of colombia's election. china noticed him because of hot peppers. these are not the same type of coverage and he somehow has both.
anyway. the drones were the only ones who saw this coming.