Logan Paul’s NFT game, was it all a puff?

Logan Paul, a 27-year-old YouTuber turned boxer, has a huge following online. As of January 2023, he had more than 24 million followers on Instagram and over 23 million subscribers on Youtube. Over the years, the Internet personality has been involved in a number of different scandals, including promoting a meme coin called Dink Doing which quickly lost over 90% of its value.

Previously, we have covered the crypto projects that get abandoned. In this article, we are going to unveil the mysterious story of Logan Paul’s NFT game called CryptoZoo.

What is CryptoZoo?

Logan Paul announced his NFT project CryptoZoo in a podcast in August 2021. In the video, he promised a fun game that can help users not only purchase and own unique digital items but also earn yield, meaning that they are using the play-to-earn concept. 

In the same video, the influencer mentioned that the game was almost finished (it had been in the making for 6 months) and that the team paid about $1 million “out of pocket”. What is more, Logan Paul talked about “handmade art” by 10 different artists. 

The official whitepaper states that CryptoZoo is supposed to be an autonomous ecosystem, where users can purchase NFT eggs using the in-game currency ZOO tokens or Ethereum. Later on, the eggs are hatched, and the players see what kind of animal they got, they create hybrids of different animals and play with them. These hybrids get a certain level of rarity. Rare NFTs are expected to yield 64,500 ZOO tokens per day.

It is hard to call this concept completely new – there are other play-to-earn games that use the same or very similar idea, for example, Axie Infinity (AXS).

The roadmap intended for the project to be finalized by 2023: there are supposed to be two games as well as a Metaverse.  

What does CryptoZoo look like now?

It is clear at this point that the roadmap milestones were not met. At least, at the time of writing this article, the site was not working at all, promising some core infrastructure updates coming soon.

The users and investors in the three-part investigation of Stephen Findeisen who goes by Coffeezilla on YouTube said that the game never actually worked, they could not even hatch the eggs, which was one of the main functions. Despite this, the game’s Twitter account kept announcing various events like auctions and airdrops. 

In the meantime, some Reddit users suspect that the handmade art was actually stock pictures.

What happened after the investigation?

The whole story went viral in December 2022 when the investigation we mentioned above was uploaded. In it, the independent researcher Stephen Findeisen talked to the investors who claimed to have lost thousands of dollars, the developers that accuse the influencer of not paying them, as well as people from Logan Paul’s team. 

After the videos went viral, the influencer made a response saying that Stephen Findeisen twisted the facts and had an agenda, also stating his willingness to sue the YouTuber. Logan Paul later deleted the video and dropped the lawsuit threats. 

Paul’s explanation of the situation was that it was he who got scammed - by a developer who took the code “hostage” and was hiding in Switzerland. This developer, who Logan Paul revealed in his now-deleted response video, was Zach Kelling, who also appeared in the investigation, claiming that he was never paid for his work. Later the influencer apologized on his Discord, thanked Coffezilla for bringing up the issue, and promised to “make it right.”

As of now, the future of the project remains uncertain. Hopefully, the team behind it manages to resolve their differences, and the game gets finished, as Logan Paul has promised, in 2023 or 2024.

We at SimpleSwap are happy to help you navigate the complicated world of crypto, gaming, and digital art, for example, you can read our article about the phenomenon of NFT.