YouTuber and web persona Logan Paul has discovered himself with a large goal on his brow not too long ago. Paul, who’s been on one thing of a redemption arc these previous few years following the “suicide forest” fiasco in December 2017, is again in scorching water after crypto investigator Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen printed a three-part video collection wanting into CryptoZoo, a blockchain “recreation” Paul as soon as closely promoted. There are simply two evident issues right here: The sport doesn’t exist but, and Paul’s most ardent followers and early traders have misplaced a whole bunch of hundreds of {dollars} within the technique of supporting it.
Logan Paul, the older brother of boxer and media persona Jake Paul, is a YouTuber who started creating content material on Vine within the early 2010s earlier than migrating to Google’s video platform as soon as Vine shuttered. He usually uploads vlog-style movies during which he presents viewers a voyeuristic look into his every day life and the varied shenanigans he engages in. Whereas already a controversial determine throughout his early content material creation days, Paul didn’t actually draw the web’s ire till December 2017 when he filmed a video in Japan’s Aokigahara Forest during which he and members of his crew filmed and interacted with a lifeless physique in a way many thought of tasteless and inappropriate. (Aokigahara has a fame for being a web site of frequent suicides.)
This video and the next response to it completely tanked Paul’s profession for a lot of 2018. Nonetheless, since then, Paul’s been rehabilitating his picture as a media persona {and professional} wrestler, signing to WWE’s Uncooked whereas internet hosting a YouTube podcast that boasts over 4 million subscribers. Dude’s doing very properly for himself. Nonetheless, he’s the web’s fundamental character once more following what seems to be his involvement in one of many largest crypto scams that has been uncovered so far.
In a three-part video collection totaling just a little over an hour, Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen—a YouTuber who “uncovers scams, fraudsters, and faux gurus which are preying on determined individuals with misleading promoting”—seemed into CryptoZoo. What the hell is CryptoZoo? Effectively, as Paul explains it, it’s a “actually enjoyable recreation that earns you cash.” In keeping with the official web site, which says the sport is at the moment “present process upgrades to the core infrastructure of the ecosystem,” CryptoZoo is an “autonomous ecosystem that permits ZooKeepers to purchase, promote, and commerce unique animals and hybrids.” Principally, it’s an NFT recreation during which gamers buy zoo cash, CryptoZoo’s in-game foreign money, to purchase egg NFTs which are hatched to turn out to be animals. As soon as hatched, you then breed these animals collectively to make hybrids and the rarer the hybrid, the upper the every day yield of zoo cash. Money these out and increase, you’re pulling in cash. Briefly, it’s structured to work like passive earnings.
Sadly, this “play-to-earn” NFT recreation crammed with hand-made artwork—as Paul likes to closely emphasize on his podcast Impaulsive—has by no means but been playable, regardless of letting individuals sink tons of cash into it. Coffeezilla found that, since CryptoZoo’s introduction in 2021, Paul stans have spent some $2.5 million on eggs alone, with the coin itself skyrocketing to a market cap of roughly $2 billion. Some people Coffeezilla talked to shelled out tens, generally a whole bunch of hundreds of {dollars} on CryptoZoo as a result of they believed Paul was a “modified man” and he was making a “secure place” for the everyperson to spend money on cryptocurrency. Seems they have been fallacious, at the very least on the second half, as a result of now these individuals are out hundreds of {dollars}.
Rob, or Helicopter Bob, one of many victims Coffeezilla video-chatted with, mentioned he misplaced “slightly below $7,000 with CryptoZoo.” Helicopter Bob defined that the passive earnings, the challenge’s core mechanic, “by no means did [work] from the start and wasn’t even written into the contract the place it confirmed you have been really yielding with Zoo.” He went on to say that “there was no solution to declare your yield [and] there by no means was.” Principally, individuals have been placing cash right into a system that was offering zero returns.
Worse but, as an unnamed individual advised Coffeezilla in a separate video name, those that invested in CryptoZoo couldn’t even hatch the eggs they purchased. “It’s only a image,” the individual mentioned in regards to the eggs. “There’s nothing I can do with it. It’s principally value nothing in any respect.” So, you’ve bought diehard Paul followers pining to play a nonfunctioning recreation and dropping cash within the course of. A recreation, thoughts you, that also doesn’t work to at the present time.
In Coffeezilla’s movies, we hear Paul clarify sure points with CryptoZoo’s improvement. Particularly, he says a “developer fled to Switzerland” with the supply code and held it hostage for $1 million, and because of this the sport’s been damaged. However this developer, who Coffeezilla spoke to in the midst of his investigation, claims that he hadn’t been paid in any respect for his work on CryptoZoo, regardless of bringing on a workforce of 30 engineers and burning $50,000 every week to construct the NFT challenge. One other CryptoZoo developer Coffeezilla spoke with corroborated the declare, saying he additionally hadn’t been paid in any respect. Not solely have been Paul’s followers discovering holes of their wallets after investing in CryptoZoo, however it seems that the individuals engaged on the challenge weren’t even being paid adequately or on time.
Kotaku reached out to Findeisen and Paul for remark.
Paul, for his half, has said that the report is “merely not true” and that, “when applicable, all dangerous actors will probably be uncovered, defined, & held totally accountable,” promising extra particulars in his January 3 podcast. On December 26, Paul publicly invited Coffeezilla to look on the Impaulsive podcast to hash all the things out, although Coffeezilla responded by saying that he’d already invited Paul onto his show the day earlier than. It stays to be seen whether or not or not something will come to fruition from these exchanges.