Six months ago, YouTuber Logan Paul faced significant controversy for allegedly scamming his audience with an NFT game project called CryptoZoo, which was announced in 2021. Paul and his team sold NFTs and released a ZOO token, but the game never materialized.
After receiving criticism from YouTube researchers such as Stephen”Coffee zillaFindeisen, Paul released a video on January 13 detailing his “three step planto make things right. A month later, the influencer was hit with a class action lawsuit alleging that Paul and his team misled CryptoZoo buyers and “pulled the carpet”.
But what exactly did Paul promise in January – and has any of it been delivered?
$1.8 million in refunds “for those who don’t want to wait.”
$0 delivered.
Good marketing Logan. 👍 pic.twitter.com/BqhOY4tlYC— Coffeezilla (@coffeebreak_YT) Jun 29, 2023
If you ask Coffeezilla, the answer is a resounding “No”.
“I have spoken to the victims and watched their public Discord chat throughout the year. The last time Logan communicated with them was in January. I also contacted Logan several times to ask about this,” Coffeezilla said Decrypt in a direct message.
“According to the victims, there [have] zero payments. There’s no excuse for this. Logan has made a public statement about this, taking credit and ghosting the victims,” Coffeezilla added.
Have ZOO tokens been burned?
In Paul’s “three steps” video, which has more than 330,000 views, the entrepreneur said he and his manager Jeffrey Levin would “burn our $ZOO,” meaning the couple would send all of their ZOO tokens to a burn wallet so the tokens would become effective destroyed. Neither of them could then benefit from their ZOO tokens.
However, after studying the official ZOO contract detailed in the token’s white paper, it’s not clear that Paul or Levin burned anything from their zoo. A website detailing the project’s tokenomics identified a wallet ending in 0x6D as it used to be one of the burning wallets of the game burn 1.5 billion zoo after the first NFT release, but the wallet has been inactive since March 2022.
According to BSC Scan data, since January 2023, when Paul made this initial pledge, there have been no significant ZOO token burns from one or two wallet addresses.
However, there are persistent ZOO burns from several pockets. Since the inception of the token, a cumulative total of approx 3.7 billion ZOO has been sent to a commonly used burn wallet from the total stock of 2 trillion ZOO. Of those fire transactions, the most recent was about February 2.1 million ZOO (about $1.50).
The wallet that makes up most of ZOO’s recent brand history is the wallet 0x8d. It has consistently burned ZOO in varying amounts since March 2022. However, of the fire transactions since January, there have been no burns for more than 5 million ZOO (worth just $3.58). However, the 0x8d wallet continued to burn ZOO at random intervals throughout 2022 and so far in 2023.
Given the history, it’s unclear who the 0x8d wallet belongs to – and it doesn’t seem like Paul and Levin haven’t made their big promised token burns yet.
Largest zookeepers
Where is most of the ZOO token now? Currently it appears to be a CryptoZoo game wallet owns 70% of the total token supply. Decentralized exchange PancakeSwap is listed as holding 3% of the supply for its various users.
Of the other wallets that have remained in the top 10 by total percentage of supply, none have sent their tokens to burn wallets – and two have received their tokens in the past two weeks.
Wallet 0x87 received 21.5 billion ZOO (about $15,000) in the past 10 days, and wallet 0xf1 also received 21.5 billion ZOO less than two weeks ago. It’s currently unclear who these wallets belong to, but their assets aren’t worth nearly as much as they would have been when ZOO was at its peak. Given that the price of ZOO is down 82% over the past year, according to data from CoinGecko, those wallets’ collective assets only add up to about $30,800.
It is also worth noting that ZOOs tokenomics document allows wallets associated with “development, marketing, and founders” to unlock 10% of their token allocation every month for 10 months – though that doesn’t necessarily explain the recent 43 billion ZOO drop to two wallets.
The second largest ZOO wallet, 0x23, could also be from someone on the CryptoZoo team. It owns just over 4.8% of the total ZOO supply and its only transactions consist of two incoming receipts of 96 billion and 94 million ZOO in September 2021 and December 2022 respectively.
The second promise
Paul’s second pledge was to effectively refund holders for the price they paid for their Base Egg or Base Animal NFTs at 0.1 ETH each, which is about $193 today.
“I have pledged over $1.8 million for those who don’t want to wait for CryptoZoo to be completed,” Paul wrote in January. At the time of writing, that amount could reimburse holders for more than 9,300 NFTs.
The latest message from Logan Paul in the “announcements” channel of the CryptoZoo Discord. Image: decrypt.
In April, Paul denied in correspondence with Rolling stone and said that “all deserving parties will be refunded.”
But in posts viewed by Decryptmore than six people reported on CryptoZoo’s Discord server that they had not received a refund that was promised – six months after the promise was made.
A buyer of CryptoZoo using the alias Just pixel told Decrypt in a message that they also had not received a refund, or updates on when such a refund would come.
“I invested in total [of] ~$15K. I was able to get a little less than $2K out of it before the price completely plummeted to the ground,” Just Pixel said. “I have not received any money back. I also bought three of these egg NFTs at launch. I have not yet received it back.”
In a Discord server called “CryptoZoo Victims”, three more people confirmed Decrypt that no refund has yet been issued.
But CryptoZoo’s buyers aren’t the only ones claiming they weren’t paid by Paul. Zach Kelling, CryptoZoo engineer and first CTO, shared Decrypt in January that he still owes more than $1 million in fees for his work, which he says he completed with a team of 45 engineers.
Kelling previously told Decrypt that Paul’s YouTube videos about him even led to “life and death risks” and physical safety threats to himself and his family.
Kelling’s fiancé Antje Worring started her own spin-off philanthropy project, Zoo Labs, after they thought Paul Kelling wouldn’t pay for the work he did for CryptoZoo.
Logan Paul really is the type of guy who thanks you when you expose his scam, then blocks you when you remind him to pay. pic.twitter.com/wI1o3ilD5S
— Coffeezilla (@coffeebreak_YT) Jun 30, 2023
“There were so many lies,” Worring said Decrypt.
She claimed that CryptoZoo developer Eddie Ibanez allowed her and Kelling to live in a Manhattan apartment that Ibanez claimed he owned but actually did not, adding that Ibanez once yelled at her for not doing his laundry for him. Worring further claimed that Ibanez only paid Kelling a total of about $2,000 for his work on CryptoZoo.
Decrypt reached out to Ibanez for comment, but he did not immediately respond.
Worring said Paul’s interaction with the CryptoZoo developers was minimal, even as the project was well underway.
“He’s just the face of the project,” Worring said of Paul. “We literally never heard from him.”
The third promise
But what about the CryptoZoo game itself – is it still in development? The game’s official website still shows the same “builders build” screen from 2022. CryptoZoo hasn’t posted on its Discord, Twitter, or Instagram since claiming in January that development of the game would continue – and its blog is already radio silent for a while. more than a year.
“Absolutely nothing has happened since Logan promised Paul a refund,” CryptoZoo Victims Discord member Richie650 told me. Decrypt. “No Token Burning, No Refunds, and No Game Development.”
While Paul may not be responding to his community, he has been responding to the ongoing CryptoZoo lawsuit against him.
The lawsuit filed in February against Paul and other members of the CryptoZoo team is ongoing. According to court documents, Texas-based CryptoZoo buyer Don Holland and his counsel allege that Paul and the CryptoZoo team committed fraud via a “back pull and cheated”thousands of other consumersby not delivering the game.
Paul responded Be able to And June arguing that because he does not live in Texas, there is a lack of “personal jurisdiction” and the case should be dismissed. However, plaintiffs have since argued that two former CryptoZoo employees were based in Texas and that Ibanez also conducted some CryptoZoo work in Texas.
Paul, Levin and their representatives did not respond Decrypt‘s multiple requests for comment on the ZOO token burn, promised refunds or the future of CryptoZoo.
Does Paul’s six-month silence betray a lack of interest in the involved project? Or has he just hit pause on CryptoZoo because of the pending lawsuit?
For now, CryptoZoo holders will have to wait – and hope for a refund that remains in limbo.