Six months ago, YouTuber Logan Paul faced a lot of controversy for allegedly cheating his audience with an NFT game project called CryptoZoo that was announced in 2021. Paul and his team sold NFTs and issued a ZOO token – but the game never materialized.
After facing criticism from YouTube investigators like Stephen “Coffeezilla” Findeisen, Paul posted a video on Jan. 13 detailing his “three-step plan” to fix things. A month later, the influencer was hit with a class action lawsuit alleging that Paul and his team misled and “pressured” CryptoZoo buyers.
But what exactly did Paul promise in January—and was any of it kept?
If you ask Coffeezilla, the answer is a resounding “no”.
“I’ve spoken to the victims and followed their public Discord chat throughout the year. The last time Logan communicated with them was in January. I’ve also asked Logan about it several times,” Coffeezilla said in a direct message to Decrypt.
“According to the victims there [have] There were no payments. There is no excuse for that. Logan made a public statement about it, taking credit for it and ghosting the victims,” added Coffeezilla.
Have ZOO tokens been burned?
In Paul’s “three-step” video, which has over 330,000 views, the entrepreneur said that 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 be effectively destroyed. Neither of them could then benefit from their ZOO tokens.
However, upon examining the official ZOO contract detailed in the token’s whitepaper, it is not apparent that Paul or Levin burned down any of their ZOOs. A website detailing the project’s tokenomics identified a wallet ending in 0x6D as one of the game’s burn wallets, which burned 1.5 billion ZOO after the initial NFT release, but the wallet is dated March 2022 inactive.
According to BSC Scan, there have been no significant deletions of the ZOO token from one or two wallet addresses since January 2023, when Paul made that initial promise.
However, ZOO burns from different wallets continued to occur. Since the launch of the token, out of the total of 2 trillion ZOO, a total of about 3.7 billion ZOO has been sent to a commonly used burn wallet. The last of these burn transactions occurred in February for approximately ZOO 2.1 million (approximately US$1.50).
The wallet that accounts for the bulk of ZOO’s recent burn history is wallet 0x8d. Since March 2022, it has continuously burned ZOO in varying amounts. However, in the destruction transactions, there have been no burns for more than 5 million ZOO (worth just $3.58) since January. However, the 0x8d wallet has continued to burn ZOO at random intervals throughout 2022 and so far in 2023.
Given its history, it’s unclear who owns the 0x8d wallet – and it doesn’t look like Paul and Levin have performed their big promised token burns yet.
Largest ZOO owner
Where is the bulk of the ZOO token now? Currently, an apparent CryptoZoo game wallet holds 70% of the total token supply. The decentralized exchange PancakeSwap is said to hold 3% of the supply for its various users.
Of the other wallets remaining in the top 10 in terms of total supply, none have sent their tokens to destroy wallets — and two have received their tokens within the last two weeks.
Wallet 0x87 received 21.5 billion ZOO (about $15,000) in the last 10 days, and wallet 0xf1 also received 21.5 billion ZOO less than two weeks ago. It’s currently unclear who owns these purses, but their holdings aren’t worth nearly as much as they were in ZOO’s heyday. Given that ZOO’s price has dropped 82% over the past year, according to CoinGecko data, the total holdings of these wallets only add up to about $30,800.
It’s also worth noting that ZOO’s Tokenomics document allows wallets related to “development, marketing and founders” to unlock 10% of their token allocation every month for 10 months – although that doesn’t necessarily explain ZOO’s recent 43 billion on reduce two wallets.
The second largest ZOO wallet, 0x23, could also belong to someone from the CryptoZoo team. It holds just over 4.8% of the total ZOO supply and its only transactions consist of two incoming revenues of ZOO 96 billion and ZOO 94 million in September 2021 and December 2022, respectively.
The second promise
Paul’s second promise was to effectively refund holders the price they paid for their Base Egg or Base Animal NFTs at 0.1 ETH per unit, which is around $193 today.
“I’ve committed more than $1.8 million to those who don’t want to wait for CryptoZoo to be completed,” Paul wrote back in January. At the time of writing, this amount could reimburse holders over 9,300 NFTs.
Logan Paul’s latest message on the CryptoZoo Discord’s “Announcements” channel. Image: Decrypt.
In April, Paul denied any wrongdoing in the correspondence with Rolling Stone, saying that “all claimants will receive compensation”.
But in messages viewed by Decrypt, more than six people on CryptoZoo’s Discord server reported that they hadn’t received the promised refund – six months after the promise.
A CryptoZoo buyer known by the pseudonym Pixels only told Decrypt in a message that they also hadn’t received a refund or updates on when such a refund would be made.
“I’ve invested in total [of] ~$15,000. I was able to pull out just under $2,000 before the price completely hit the floor,” Just Pixel said. “I have not received a refund. I also bought three of these egg NFTs at launch. I haven’t received a refund for that either.”
On a Discord server called “CryptoZoo Victims,” three other people confirmed to Decrypt that refunds have not yet been issued.
But CryptoZoo buyers aren’t the only ones claiming they weren’t paid by Paul. Zach Kelling, CryptoZoo engineer and first CTO, told Decrypt in January that he was still owed over $1 million in honoraria for the work he completed with a team of 45 engineers.
Kelling previously told Decrypt that Paul’s YouTube videos of him even resulted in “risks of life and death” and threats to the physical safety of him and his family.
Kelling’s fiancee, Antje Worring, launched her own spin-off philanthropy project, Zoo Labs, after discovering that Paul Kelling wasn’t going to pay for his work at CryptoZoo.
“There were so many lies,” Worring told Decrypt.
She claimed that CryptoZoo developer Eddie Ibanez allowed her and Kelling to live in a Manhattan apartment that Ibanez claimed to own but actually didn’t, adding that Ibanez once yelled at her for messing with his laundry didn’t wash for him. Worring further claimed that Ibanez only paid Kelling about $2,000 in total for his work on CryptoZoo.
Decrypt reached out to Ibanez for comment, but he didn’t immediately respond.
Worring said that Paul’s interaction with the CryptoZoo developers was minimal, even while the project was in full swing.
“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 anything on Discord, Twitter or Instagram since claiming in January that game development would continue – and his blog has since mute on the radio for over a year.
“Absolutely nothing has happened since Logan Paul promised a refund,” CryptoZoo Victims Discord member Richie650 told Decrypt. “No token burn, no refunds and no game development.”
While Paul may not be responsive to his community, he has been responsive 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 attorney allege that Paul and the CryptoZoo team committed fraud through “rug pull” and defrauded “thousands of other consumers” by not delivering the game.
Paul responded in May and June, arguing that because he doesn’t live in Texas there is a lack of “personal jurisdiction” and that the case should be dismissed. However, the plaintiffs have since argued that two of CryptoZoo’s former employees were based in Texas and that Ibanez also did some work for CryptoZoo in Texas.
Paul, Levin, and their representatives did not respond to Decrypt’s multiple requests for comment on the ZOO token brand, the promised refunds, or the future of CryptoZoo.
Does Paul’s six-month silence reveal lack of interest in the involved project? Or did he just press pause because of the ongoing litigation at CryptoZoo?
For now, CryptoZoo holders will have to wait – and hope for a refund that remains in limbo.
