I'm actually 51% biased to this being a ritual stuff from his handlers. It has to be.
He probably needs to stay grifting for some time, the feds need new names, but since Fuentes is low quality now and won't pull in any big names anymore, just irrelevant demented groyper lonely incels, perhaps some middle management fed told him - hey Nick we can keep you around and possibly make some deals on the Baked trial, but we need to have you do this one weird trick...
The more I think about it, the more probable this sounds, our manlet faggot is too big of a control freak to fuck it up as convenient as this.
As of now, my official take on this is - this was done as a part of Baked deal. Might've watched too many spy movies.