Logan Paul & Cryptozoon NFT: What Happened?

Logan Paul, brother of Jake Paul and a popular influencer, has been criticized for launching Cryptozoo, an NFT project that ended up being a big money loser for many who invested in the game.

The community behind the game was outraged by Paul’s avoidance after significant losses of money, and more attention is being paid to this issue.

What happened to Cryptozoo?

Cryptozoo was originally introduced in 2020 during an episode of Impaulsive, a comedy podcast hosted by Logan Paul and other internet personalities. The new NFT game was said to allow players to participate in a fun gaming world and earn passive income.

Logan Paul, the promoter of the game, told the audience that the team had spent 6 months creating handcrafted NFTs, which also made the project’s unique selling point. Paul said at least a million dollars had been spent building the game and creating unique NFTs.

Bad eggs…

To obtain the NFT Eggs, people had to buy in-game tokens called $ZOO. According to the project’s official website, these eggs could be hatched at launch, and people would retrieve their animals, breed them and mix them to create new breeds.

The team ranked in money as $2.5 million eggs were sold on the opening date, regardless of skepticism from community members. Doubt was most influenced by Paul’s association with a previous failed NFT project – Dink Donk.

But Cryptozoo’s followers thought it was different at the time.

Cryptozoo finally launched some of its so-called original NFT animals in 2021, and the hype immediately turned to disappointment.

The originally released artworks were simply altered images that can easily be found on some Internet sources. And just when people thought it couldn’t get much worse, the latest disaster struck.

People who bought the animal NFTs reported that they either couldn’t hatch their eggs, demanded their returns, or withdrew their money.

Once the deposit is made, there is no going back. As soon as investors began to question the ongoing problems, the system was down and the price of $ZOO plummeted by over 60%. Logan Paul’s response at the time was nothing but humiliating silence.

Breaking The Silence

Controversial founder Logan Paul finally resurfaced after a period of silence, blaming the failure on the project’s lead developer. According to Paul, the lead developer took the code to Switzerland and refused to return it without payment of a million dollars.

Paul explained the behind-the-scenes drama in an interview with The Block in April this year:

“We got involved with the wrong people who made some mistakes and blunders and we have a great team now [is] still working on it.”

However, Coffeezilla, an American YouTuber dedicated to exposing scams and scams, contacted the aforementioned developer and another, and they said different things.

According to a recorded interview from the developer allegedly in Switzerland, Logan Paul is responsible for the problem from the beginning.

The developer emphasized that Paul hired his team to code the game, but was unable to pay the team, so he took the code for later negotiations. Another developer confirmed the payment error.

Cryptozoo has shown no signs of progress since the scandal. Logan Paul, on the other hand, quickly jumped into another NFT project. Maybe he learned from his mistakes, but is that enough to save his reputation after a string of controversial NFTs?

legal or not?

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US has previously warned about celebrity-backed NFT ventures and other initial coin offerings (ICOs).

The firm advised investors that celebrity endorsements could be used in paid advertising and that caution was needed.

According to the SEC, it is illegal for celebrities and influencers to use social media to encourage their followers to buy cryptocurrencies or other potentially illegal assets if they do not disclose the type, sources and amount of any compensation to be received should the circumstances arise.

The SEC fined Kim Kardashian $1.26 million in October for illegally promoting cryptocurrency on Instagram last year.

However, there are calls for some tightening of the regulations to deal with serious cases such as Cryptozoo.