Taiwanese YouTuber Saint, also known as Tseng Sheng-chieh, posted a video on Aug. 28 saying he was back on YouTube. The title opened with his trademark line, then went straight to the question: why come back now? By noon on Aug. 29, it had pulled in more than 60,000 views.
That same question spread fast in the comments and across social media: was he back because crypto losses had gotten too big?
Saint said no. Flatly. He said his break had nothing to do with the crypto market. In his telling, he did not stop posting because his career had cooled off. He stopped because he truly had no time. He said his wife, Dudu, spent three years getting treatment for an illness, and the next three years were taken up by pregnancy and round-the-clock childcare. Only after the family hired a foreign domestic helper in April did he start getting his nights back.
He said the spark for returning was partly a fluke. He had begun using TikTok to learn AI applications, then accidentally tapped the go-live button and watched old followers pour in. Then came another moment. During a livestream, he yelled his old catchphrase, "Bang," and a penalty clip where he drank cilantro milk tea after losing a PK challenge crossed 1 million views on Instagram Reels. That, he said, brought invitations to perform at universities and to sing a game theme song.
Asked if he returned because he had lost too much in crypto, Saint answered: "It's only natural to make money from work; nobody ever complains about having too much money" ("work to make money is only right; nobody thinks they have too much money").
Public upload history does not match a first video of the year narrative
BlockTempo said the channel’s public upload record tells a different story. The idea that the Aug. 28 video was his first upload of 2026 does not hold up. The outlet said it was actually his 15th video of the year.
Saint had already started posting again on June 4. The report counted three videos in June, four in July, and seven in August. And yes, two videos went up on Aug. 28 alone. The biggest one in that run was a July 11 upload titled "I showed up in a music textbook?" ("Did I appear in a music textbook?"), which got more views than the comeback-explanation video.
Go back a bit more and the pattern gets clearer. The report said his long-form upload list before then stretched back five months, and before that it jumped straight to a batch of videos from three years earlier. So when he said he had "stopped updating for six years," he was talking about life stages as he counted them — three years spent accompanying his wife during treatment, plus three years of childcare — not the channel’s literal posting record. For long-form videos, the gap was about three years. For short-form clips, he had already come back more than two months earlier.
Bitcoin has risen over the past 30 days, but the timeline does not line up
BlockTempo also stacked that social media theory against the market timeline.
Bitcoin was quoted at $77,555, up 21.29% over the past 30 days. But zoom out and the picture changes. It was still down 29.62% over the past year and remained 38.5% below its all-time high of $126,080, set on Oct. 6, 2025.
Ether looked worse. The report placed ETH at $2,435, down 44.56% over the past year and sitting at roughly half of its August 2025 peak.
And this is the real issue: timing. Saint had already started posting again on June 4. The Bitcoin rebound mentioned in the report only formed over the past month. Put those dates next to each other and the claim falls apart. Rising crypto prices do not line up as the reason he returned to making content.
Saint’s earlier crypto involvement
Saint started running his personal YouTube channel in October 2016 and hit 1 million subscribers in 225 days through daily uploads. At the time, that was the fastest record in Taiwan. BlockTempo said the mark stood until March 2025, when Andy Teacher broke it.
At the end of 2021, he launched an NFT project under his own name, and the first drop sold out. He also promoted the Taiwanese project Sweetyard Dog and said he made more than NT$10 million from NFTs in the first week of 2022.
In March 2022, the Sweetyard Dog floor price dropped from 0.3 ETH to 0.01 ETH, while the SYD token fell 96.13%. Saint then wiped his Instagram and YouTube accounts, and some internet users accused him of having "dumped on followers and left." He said at the time that he had not run away and that he deleted the posts because he was reading spiritual books and wanted peace of mind. He also wrote: "In the future, I will be more careful and restrained when speaking about topics related to the crypto circle" ("in the future, on topics about the crypto circle, I will be more cautious with my words and actions").
In a July 2024 interview, Saint said he started investing with NT$10,000. At one stage, nearly half of his assets were in crypto. But by April that year, he had already redeemed all of his principal, leaving only profits in the positions he still held.
In January 2025, when he was caught up in a rental dispute involving a former employee of Tsai Aga, he publicly described himself as a full-time investor focused on angel investment and startup incubation.
By Saint’s own earlier version of events, he pulled out his principal two years ago. On that timeline, the current slump would not have hit his original cost basis. So BlockTempo’s view was simple: the claim that he came back because of losses does not match the public record it reviewed.