YouTuber and internet personality Logan Paul recently found himself with a big goal on his forehead. Paul, who has been in an arc of redemption for the past few years “suicide forest” fiasco in December 2017, resurfaced after crypto investigator Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen published a three-part video review series. Crypto Zoo, a blockchain “game” that Paul once promoted heavily. There are only two obvious problems here: The game doesn’t exist yet, and Paul’s biggest fans and early investors have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process of supporting it.
Logan Paul, brother of boxer and media personality Jake Paul, is a YouTuber who started creating content on Vine in the early 2010s before switching to Google’s video platform after Vine closed. He regularly uploads vlog-style videos in which he gives viewers a voyeuristic look at his daily life and the various snares he is involved in. 2017 when he shot a video in Japan Aokigahara Forest in which he and members of his crew film and interact with a corpse in a way that many consider tasteless and inappropriate. (Aokigahara is notorious for being the site of frequent suicides.)
This video and the subsequent reaction to it completely ruined Paul’s career for much of 2018. Since then, however, Paul has restored his image as a media personality and professional wrestler, signed with WWE’s Raw when host a podcast on YouTube boasts over four million subscribers. Dude is doing great for himself. However, he is the main protagonist of the internet after what appears to be his involvement in one of the largest crypto scams discovered to date.
In a three-part series of videos totaling over an hour, Stephen “Coffee” Findeisen—a YouTuber who “discovered scams, scammers, and fake masters preying on desperate people with deceptive ads” —reviewed CryptoZoo. What the hell is CryptoZoo? As good as Paul explains, it’s a “really fun game that makes you money.” Follow Official website, says the game is currently “being upgraded to the core infrastructure of the ecosystem,” CryptoZoo is an “autonomous ecosystem that allows ZooKeeper to buy, sell, and trade exotic animals and crossbreed.” It’s basically an NFT game where players buy zoo currency, the in-game currency of CryptoZoo, to buy NFT eggs that are hatched into animals. Once hatched, you will breed those animals together to create hybrids, and the rarer the hybrids, the higher the daily output of zoo coins. Cash out and boom, you’re cashing out. In a nutshell, it’s structured to work like passive income.
Unfortunately, this “play for money” NFT game is chock full of handmade art—as Paul likes to put a lot of emphasis on his podcast. impulsive—never been playable, despite allowing people to pour tons of money into it. Coffeezilla has found that, since CryptoZoo launched in 2021, Paul stans have spent around $2.5 million on eggs alone, and the coin itself has skyrocketed to market cap. about 2 billion dollars. Some of the people Coffeezilla spoke to have spent tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars on CryptoZoo because they believe that Paul is a “changed person” and that he is creating a “safe place” for everyone. invest in cryptocurrencies. Turns out they were wrong, at least on the second part, because now those people have made thousands of dollars.
Rob, or Helicopter Bob, one of the victims who video chatted with Coffeezilla, said he lost “just under $7,000 with CryptoZoo.” Helicopter Bob explains that passive income, the core mechanism of the project, “never” [work] in the first place and not even being written into the contract shows that you really gave in to Zoo.” He goes on to say that “there is no way to claim your output [and] Never have.” Basically, people are putting money into a system that is not profitable.
Worse still, as an unnamed person told Coffeezilla in a private video call, people who invested in CryptoZoo couldn’t even hatch the eggs they bought. “It’s just a picture,” the person said of the eggs. “There is nothing I can do about it. It’s basically worth nothing.” So you’ve got die-hard Paul fans eager to play a game that doesn’t work and lose money in the process. One game, mind you, remains inactive to this day.
In the Coffeezilla videos, we hear Paul explain some of the problems with the development of CryptoZoo. Specifically, he said that a “developer fled to Switzerland” with the source code and took it hostage for $1 million, and this is why the game broke. But this developer, with whom Coffeezilla spoke during the investigation, claims that he was not paid at all for his work on CryptoZoo, despite hiring a team of 30 engineers and burning 50,000 dollars per week to build the NFT project. Another CryptoZoo developer, Coffeezilla, spoke to corroborating the claim, stating that he has also not been paid. Not only did Paul’s fans see their wallets at a loss after investing in CryptoZoo, but it seems that the people working on the project are not even getting paid in full or on time.
Kotaku Have reached out to Findeisen and Paul for comment.
Paul, for his part, said that The report is “simply untrue” and that, “when appropriate, all bad actors will be exposed, explained and fully held accountable,” promising to provide more details in the day’s podcast. his January 3. December 26, Paul Publicly invited Coffeezilla appeared on impulsive podcast to shred things up, although Coffeezilla responded by saying he invited Paul to join his show Yesterday. It remains to be seen whether anything will materialize from these exchanges.
