If anyone hasn't heard about it, Coffeezilla made a 3 part video after a year long investigation into the NFT "Game" Cryptozoo created by Logan Paul.
To put it shortly, they created an NFT game where you're supposed to buy "eggs" and can also invest in the token called "zoo" and then you were supposed to hatch the eggs, be able to combine the animals to generate new fused animals and well, no further plans beyond that were really established since the project died before it could get there.
This is going to be some of my thoughts on it based on having watched the videos and another video by Logan after the ones from Coffeezilla, so keep in mind I may miss some points but the important ones will probably be true.
Logan hired people to work on the project, it was initially a copy of another project that rugged users. Then he hired a team manager called Eddie Ibanez, he was in charge of finding devs and keeping the project together and development running. Then he hired some guy who nicknames himself the "crypto king", I recalled this guy from the one of very few other videos of Logan Paul I've watched during the mania of opening old Pokemon packs. Quite literally everyone in the comments and on Reddit were talking how this cryptoking person knew close to nothing about the Pokemon cards he was there as an "expert" for, prior to getting there with the very expensive Pokemon Box it had come to light that he had attempted to scam another big influencer with a re-sealed box. How Logan didn't hear about this and many of his other negligence is beyond me, maybe he and his team are so beyond reading and researching that they just hope/take for granted that everything will fall onto their laps. Either way, he chose to work together with him again and hired him as an advisor for the project.
Now things start to get weird and honestly not many bring up the legalty of this part. I'm not even going to mention how Logan has many times lied about how he has a team of artists working on the artwork and how he has spent 1 million dollars of his own money into it, I think I'm just going to leave this "fused" animals piece here. Needless to say no artist has touched this other than photoshopping stock images together:
What was the worst was the manipulation that went on, it kind of gave me a slight flashback of @steemit but honestly not even they were as bad even though they did get like 80% of the supply early on. There were screenshots showing some of the messages between Logan and his advisor and other team members where they discuss the token launch. How they're going to do a "stealth launch", basically creating the token at a certain date, not telling anyone that they're the ones behind the token or that the token will represent the project, just create it, then of course buy it themselves for over a month until they made it public. This, if anything, is the worst part of this whole ordeal and I may not be up to speed on crypto laws but if this doesn't get punished I don't know what the SEC is doing. Even @dan knew to do this through mining rather than just create some shitty token on BSC and buy from the liquidity pool themselves. The screenshots literally kept mentioning how they're (the team) are going to be buying little at a time to not increase the price, and to make matters worse even discussing how much they could sell once the token was "live", i.e. the project was launched and the token was made public. And to up the "worse" factor even more, they were naturally also going to just airdrop a bunch of the supply to themselves. Like honestly what in the fuck were they thinking there? Was the cryptoking not advising him that "hey idiot, this is all happening on a blockchain, there's timestamps and a history of transactions of all buys and sells". Which serious investor is not going to at least notice and give it a second thought if the token has had a month of trading activity before deciding to go for it.
Now I may give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe they were smart enough to know that during the time they were launching it there was a TON of bot activity due to any and all shitcoins being scanned for when they're created and bots buying them up early on hoping for another Shiba Inu.
Now here's were things get backstabby and funny/sad. Cryptoking the advisor had of course started buying up a lot more of the token through many other alt addresses and when time came to start launching it they were like "hey wait a minute there's some addresses here who've bought up to $250k worth of tokens, we can't have that". LOL. Like honestly, you can't make up the greed factor here, first the advisor was being greedy knowing that Logan with his influence was going to carry the token to some heights at least so he had then later on talking to Coffeezilla admitted that he was the one behind those $250k buys so then Logan wanted to cut him out, without knowing that it is him, could've been anyone, because they had bought way too much of the "premine" and then that's what they did. They instead launched a "V2" token that airdropped zoo tokens to the previous buyers, but skipped a few big wallets which I assume fucked over cryptoking somewhat, but not enough.
Turns out cryptoking had bought with more wallets than they managed to detect, so when the token launched and Logan having been on twitter and other platforms shilling how great it's going to be, how he's spent $1m of his own money into it, how it has the potential to be the next Pokemon (lol), etc, naturally it started doing well, but for a very, very short time.
This is where it gets funny cause Coffeezilla was showing some screenshots were cryptoking came into the team chat and talked about how "some big holders are selling currently at this marketcap (can't remember exactly but somewhere around $200m) and that the token went down to $40m marketcap now. This was something that triggered Logan which caused him to say "wtf? who are these sellers, there shouldn't be any sellers other than us and we shouldn't be selling here, at least not these amounts" (even though I'm quoting here it's not actually quotes of the exact chat). Cryptoking replied with something like "hey, these things happen, bots take profits, it's a good start" etc, to which Logan was all "40m? nah fuck that, something's going on here"
Not sure what exactly transpired after that but it somehow became known that cryptoking was the main seller at that time and he did it cause he was mad Logan blacklisted a lot of his wallets before the launch/airdrop and cause he had put $250k into it so he took more profits than what the team would've wanted as it stifled growth of the price. So here you have again, proof that they literally manipulated not just the early supply but also attempted to manipulate how slow they're taking out profit to not cause the token to crash like most others did at the time.
I decided to go take a look at the chart of Zoo for fun, here you can see the "stealth" accumulation period:
This and previous top I assume is where cryptoking and others (Eddie Ibanez) and probably bots took profits:
Needless to say this is how the rest of the chart looks like, surprisingly though there's some heartbeat at the end, possibly from Logan mentioning now how he's going to make sure the project gets completed after having been called out by Coffee and others after at least a year of him completely ignoring mentioning it anywhere:
Honestly though with how idiotic most crypto prices are I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up not flatlining, not financial advice of course. (don't sue me anyone, especially not Logan since he's mentioned that he's going to sue Coffeezilla for defamation (lol)).
Logan seems to think that just because he didn't sell it's "not a scam" and that he shouldn't get in any trouble. What do you think?
You should honestly check the video series as it's quite entertaining and a lot more to it than what I mentioned here of course, from Logan hiring shady scammers to his team (that Eddie guy had lied his way into the project and many other instances) to devs holding the code "hostage" and blackmailing Logan for $1m to release it so the project could go somewhere and actually work, to there also have been a sale of "eggs" of where those profits are unknown to where or who exactly they've gone to (could be Logan did get some profit even if he didn't sell his team allocation) and a lot of other "nice" things.
Oh crypto, when will you stop being garbage, or you know, at least focus some of that money into longterm decent projects rather than always being a get rich/poor quick scheme.
