Cryptocurrency founder Richard Heart is looking for attention. In his first onscreen interview in new documentary The Highest of Stakes, he’s wearing a Burberry bonnet cap, a teal and orange floral Versace tank top, four watches worth a total of $3.1 million, and a chain with a massive hexagon charm. It’s the logo of Hex, the cryptocurrency token he founded. “You gotta scream real loud to punch through the noise,” he explains.
It works — though some of the attention Heart gets may not be the kind he wants. On July 31, the Securities & Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against him and his three companies for allegedly making unregistered offerings and sales of crypto securities to investors and using “at least” $12 million of fraudulent proceeds to fund purchases of luxury cars, watches, and the Enigma, the largest black diamond in the world. The SEC’s charges haven’t seemed to bother Heart’s supporters, who have shown an outpouring of support on Twitter. To them, it’s just another bit of noise.
The Highest of Stakes positions itself to cut through the controversy and offer a final verdict on whether Heart is a scammer or a genius. Directed by Patrick Moreau and Grant Peelle (the duo behind 2014’s #standwithme), the film hears testimony in Heart’s favor from his supporters (termed “Hexicans”), who praise his genius and credit Hex with their financial success. Skeptical of Hex’s promises, Dr. Kelly Richmond Pope and Dr. Lamont Black, professors of accounting and finance (respectively) at DePaul University, look to understand the mechanics behind Hex through discussions with Heart and his Hexicans.
From Heart’s perspective, Hex isn’t just rebelling against traditional investing, it’s rebelling against the status quo of cryptocurrency. “I think you should trust me, but if you get into the habit of trusting people like me, you’ll get the crap scammed out of you,” he says. The successful Hexicans are the ones that listen to his advice, he says — if you lose money, you’re not doing it right. Moreau and Peelle show where that gets complicated when a Dallas resident named Mikey invests $100,000 behind his wife’s back and sees his investment shrink until it’s worth $594.
Under criticism, Heart provides no answers and only doubles down. He believes that “finance is a mechanism for the impatient to give their money to the patient,” so Mikey just has to be patient. When Pope and Black question his philosophy and his flashy lifestyle, he appears childish as he simply agrees with all of their concerns to shock them and avoid accountability. “I’m in this for glory, that’s all I care about,” he announces. “I want to be better than every other cryptocurrency founder that’s ever existed, which I might currently be.” If you love Heart, this mentality is what makes him special. If you don’t, the entire sequence is frustrating and hard to watch.
Although Pope and Black grill Heart on his claims and uncover concerning loopholes in Hex’s operations, they don’t announce a final verdict. Moreau and Peelle end the film without a definitive conclusion but with plenty of drama, whipping both supporters and detractors up into a fit. It’s just the sort of ending Heart would love — or does love, given his promotion of the film on Twitter and Hex’s website. The film appears to be created by and for Heart’s insular fan base: One producer, credited as “Tobiwan Hexobi,” is featured on hex.com’s testimonial page and retweeted a post that described The Highest of Stakes’ marketing as Heart sending “a deliberate message to the SEC: ‘Come and get me.’” Other producers have similarly affiliated themselves with Hex on the social media site.
Without this context, The Highest of Stakes looks like a documentary with too many drone shots of sports cars that fails to deliver on its promises. With it, it’s obvious that the film isn’t intending to offer any insight into a controversial figure — it’s a part of Heart’s outrage engine.
This article appears in August 4 • 2023.