What is the Ryan Trahan challenge? Understanding why the YouTuber is crossing America with 1 penny

YouTube content creator Ryan Trahan has gone viral on the internet as he is currently undertaking a challenge that features him traveling across America with 1 penny to meet YouTube legend Jimmy "MrBeast."

Ryan Trahan is a widely popular YouTuber who has more than 9.6 million subscribers with a mind-boggling 1.1 billion channel views.

According to YouTube statistics tracking website SocialBlade, Ryan has amassed close to a million subscribers in the past month thanks to his latest challenge.

---

Why is Ryan Trahan traversing across America to meet MrBeast?

Ryan Trahan embarked upon a month-long journey earlier this month (June 1) and uploaded the first video titled "I Survived On $0.01 for 30 Days," in which he worked directly with Team Feed to help end hunger in America.

According to Team Feed's donation page, the main objective of the challenge is to showcase the power of the penny and how one penny can help people fight and end hunger.

The content creator has planned on documenting and uploading the 30-day long, cross-country adventure from Los Angeles, California to Greenville, North Carolina.

In the series, Ryan Trahan aimed to use a single penny to survive for a month while traversing across the country. He introduced the challenge and set the following ground rules:

"This is a penny and I'm going to use it to cross America in the next 30 days. Here's the rules. Rule number one, all profits must come from the penny. Rule number two, all grub, boarding and transportation must come from the profit from the penny."

The third rule stated that Ryan Trahan would have to meet and deliver the penny to MrBeast within a month:

"Rule number three, I have only 30 days to deliver MrBeast this penny because they're going extinct next year and there's no way has one."

After introducing a set of rules, Ryan began his journey and started selling items to make enough money to eat and travel to the next destination. In his first video, the YouTuber set a target of making at least $28 to buy the bus ticket to the next city.

Since then, the 23-year-old content creator has kept on uploading videos on a regular basis and all the content has attracted multiple million views.

However, his journey was not a smooth ride. On the 12th day of the challenge (June 12), MrBeast decided to donate a massive sum of $50,000 with the note stating "THE GREAT RESET: I will start over at $0.01; loser."

The Great Reset is an incentive for a $50,000 donation which requires Ryan Trahan to give up all of his profits and start over from $0.01.

The YouTube philanthropist replied to the Spicewood, Texas native's Twitter post claiming that he would do the same a few days later.

Fast forward to June 22, Ryan surprised the YouTube community by revealing that his challenge had helped raise more than $1,000,000 for Team Feed's Feeding America initiative.

The update was a viral hit as it garnered more than 600 fan replies and 35.7k likes.

At the time of writing, Ryan Trahan is on Day 27 of his journey and only has three days remaining to deliver the soon-to-be-extinct penny to MrBeast. The YouTuber concluded the video by teasing that he had something big lined up to be revealed on the 28th day of his challenge.

Fans should be on the lookout for June 30, when Ryan uploads the final video update for the "I Survived On $0.01 for 30 Days" challenge.