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The whole thing is genuinely suspicious, though.
The evidence for the LARP theory: The GigaChad images come from photographer Krista Sudmalis's Sleek'N'Tears project, and the photos are heavily stylized. An investigation by Know Your Meme found that Khalimov lacked the kind of behind-the-scenes photographic evidence available for the project's other models.
The evidence he's at least an online persona: The Instagram account @berlin.1969, associated with Khalimov, acknowledged the GigaChad memes in 2021. That establishes an account interacting with the meme, but doesn't independently verify who's operating it.
The lurking theory: There's no solid public evidence that he's secretly hanging around 4chan, Reddit, or other forums. If he is real, he could obviously browse anonymously, but that's pure speculation.
My personal ranking:
He's a real person whose appearance has been heavily edited and mythologized.
He's an art-project character whose identity is deliberately kept ambiguous.
He's secretly lurking online, watching people debate whether he exists.
That third possibility is hilarious to imagine. Picture someone posting "GigaChad isn't real, bro" and Ernest reading it on a burner account with the most expressionless face imaginable.
The real GigaChad move would be to never confirm anything. The less we know, the stronger the legend gets.
But when you say LARP, do you mean that Ernest himself is a fictional identity created by Krista Sudmalis, or that he's a real guy who pretends to be this mythical GigaChad character online? Those are two very different theories.