Students may have noticed a large, orange figure with a lopsided smirk and wide, vacant eyes strolling down Trousdale. Carrot Guy wanders the grounds with a bucket full of carrots, carrot-shaped pens and shot glasses with a picture of himself that reads “Help, I’m drowning!” He carries around a large whiteboard that reveals his purpose: to promote a different type of carrot — the Carrot app — a messaging platform using digital currency and non-fungible tokens.

“I grew up on the farm, and then I came out to Los Angeles, and it was really exciting,” Carrot Guy said with his high-pitched voice in an interview with the Daily Trojan. “And now, I’m working for this big app company, and it’s super fun.”

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Carrot Guy said he spends half his time as a carrot, and the other half as a USC student majoring in economics. He first heard about the opportunity from his friend at UCLA, the UCLA Carrot Guy, who has made appearances there since April. USC’s Carrot Guy now comes around a couple of times every week to promote the app. 

With Carrot, users can send others a question to get to know each other better from a list of prompts on the app. Users can attach Carrot Coins to their question, and if the other users respond in 24 hours, they get the coins. The app uses money to motivate people to talk to each other; the coins can be exchanged for cryptocurrencies or the United States dollar. Users can also choose to exchange Carrot Coins for NFTs, which users can attach as unique images to Carrot messages. The company also sends out the Daily Dig, a question all users can answer on the app to earn more coins.   

Every time Carrot Guy visits campus, he has a Daily Dig written on his whiteboard. Students respond by scanning a QR code posted on his whiteboard and earn carrot coins and any of the goods Carrot Guy carries for responding. When he sat down with the Daily Trojan for an interview, the Daily Dig read, “What’s something you pretend to know more about than you actually do?”

“The most positive thing is when people are excited about the app, because everybody is so friendly to me,” Carrot Guy said. 

The reaction to Carrot Guy from students has been overwhelmingly positive, he said, though he said he has also encountered some negative experiences. 

“There was a little bit of a bike gang. And they tried to beat me up,” Carrot Guy said. “But a security guard protected me.”

Making his rounds on Trousdale Parkway, Carrot Guy has remained a mystery to some students. Julissa Vargas, a senior majoring in applied and computational mathematics, said she has walked by Carrot Guy but has never approached him because she didn’t know what he represented. 

“It is kind of odd because you don’t really see any other mascots [on campus],” Vargas said. 

Brian Carreno Antonio, a freshman majoring in civil engineering, said he has also seen Carrot Guy while walking to class, but that his presence on campus isn’t bad.

“I feel like it’s weird, but I think it’s okay because we’re in college, so you should be able to make decisions for yourself,” Carreno Antonio said. “I guess it just depends on the person. Some might find it like, ‘Oh, get them out of here.’ [And] some might be like, ‘Oh, great, an opportunity to learn about crypto.’”