YouTuber Coffeezilla has recently released a series of videos investigating something called CryptoZoo, a “game” announced and promoted by popular internet personality Logan Paul. As of this writing, the Coffeezilla series of YouTube videos has over 16.5 million views. The videos accuse Logan Paul of scamming his audience in an investigation that takes over an hour to watch.
Not one to take accusations lying down, Paul has since responded in a video of his own, refuting some of the claims Coffeezilla has made against him. Of course, in situations like this, there is certainly more than one side to the story. So, what happened with CryptoZoo, and what have Coffeezilla and Logan Paul said about the situation? Let’s unpack the videos and explain everything you need to know about the CryptoZoo accusations.
Everything you need to know about the CryptoZoo accusations
The first of the Coffeezilla videos, which you can view above, lays out that CryptoZoo was a game that Paul was launching, one built with NFT and blockchain technology. Playing the game would allow the users to make money, and yet the video begins with several testimonials from players telling the audience how much money they lost from the project. But in Logan Paul’s video, which you can watch a little further down, he claims that one of those players was already involved in prior bust crypto schemes.
The main gripe with Logan Paul in Coffeezilla’s videos seems to be that he promoted the game until it launched, and then when it did not work the way he was touting it would, he kept quiet. This resulted in players not making money but losing it with one player in the video losing $500,000. How the game works is not really important, but essentially you are supposed to be able to trade in-game NFTs for a special cryptocurrency, and it clearly did not work.
At first glance, the problem with CryptoZoo seems to be that the game did not launch in a state that was what was promised by Logan. The game was not in the state they wanted it in when it launched in 2021, and Coffeezilla reported that this was because the developers of the game were not paid. In his videos, Coffeezilla interviewed a developer who he called “Z” who apparently fled to Switzerland for a year after claiming he was not paid for his work on the game.
In Logan Paul’s rebuttal, he claims that Coffeezilla did not identify “Z” because he knows that “Z” is Zach Kelling, a man who has been charged with multiple felonies. Paul also provides evidence that Kelling was lying about his weekly burn rate of $50,000 which he was divvying up to his 30 engineers as he found out that there were only three engineers working on CryptoZoo. This is a problem because Kelling was demanding $1 million for the work, which he would not have needed if the burn rate was less than he was espousing. Although Coffeezilla also interviews another developer who also claims that they were not paid as well.
In the response video that Logan Paul put out, he does say that the first time Coffeezilla attempted to contact him was on Dec. 24, 2022, on Christmas Eve, a day after he released his video. The way Coffeezilla contacted him was through his email, as he stated in his videos that Logan had blocked him on Twitter, so he attempted to talk to him through Logan’s manager, Jeff Levin. This annoyed Paul as well, as he said in his response that he was not contacted, and would have preferred to have been. Levin could not say much on the topic, stating no comment undoubtedly not wanting to muddle the waters for any court cases.
We know what Levin said because Coffeezilla recorded the phone call and played it in the video, and according to Paul, it was done without Levin’s consent. We are not lawyers here so we cannot say that what Coffeezilla did here was illegal, but this might be chalked up to whether or not two-party consent applied in that conversation if Levin did not consent. Either way, the call did not prove much, just that Levin wanted to keep quiet about the situation.
By the end of the first video, Coffeezilla introduces a new name into the conversation, Eddie Ibanez, who is uncovered to be a conman who lied about being an orphan, lied about going to MIT, and who lied about leading the Philadelphia Eagles to their Superbowl win. He was the one who was in charge of managing the developers, and according to the video, it was his fault that the developers were not paid the money that they were owed.
However, according to Coffeezilla, the problems persisted even after Ibanez left the team because some of the developers that worked on the project were only paid after they had already left for not being paid. But this ends up on the sidelines as Coffeezilla pivots to something a little more serious, that the founders of CryptoZoo secured their own cryptocurrency before the announced launch and more than they were allocated to have according to contracts.
In the third video, which you can see below, Coffeezilla traces their accounts through the blockchain and uncovers that Jake “Crypto King” Greenbaum, who was a member of Paul’s team, and Ibanez managed to secure the currency before the launch of the game. What is unclear is whether the scheme also involved Levin or more importantly Paul himself, but according to both Coffeezilla and Paul, neither of them made any money off the cryptocurrency. Greenbaum leaks a group chat to Coffeezilla, allegedly proving that Paul was in on the scam, except the texts are highly contextual. One thing remains clear, the launch of CryptoZoo was supposed to make Paul a large amount of money, which is why he wanted to do it, essentially copying the method from another crypto game.
Jake himself went on the record for Coffeezilla’s video and confirmed that he did make millions of dollars off the deal, but he thought that he was in the right because Paul locked him out of future dealings with the currency when he was caught buying it. Either way, it does not matter because he apparently made $6 million when there are people who lost thousands of dollars. To add, Ibanez also made over $1.5 million.
Logan does not deny that both Ibanez and Greenbaum sold their cryptocurrency, making millions of dollars off the back of people who had pre-bought items and currency in CryptoZoo. What he takes issue with is that Coffeezilla seems to be targeting him, when in his view, he did nothing wrong. You could side with Paul here, as if he did not sell the currency, but one of the main issues was that this happened in 2021, and he did not address it, instead moving on and promoting other projects.
What might be the most interesting piece of context that seems to be missing from both Coffeezilla’s and Logan Paul’s videos is that Jake “Crypto King” Greenbaum already had a reputation for being a shady character. In 2020, Logan Paul released a video in which he paid $200,000 for a box of Pokémon cards. He purchased those cards from Greenbaum, who at that point, was going by Collectibles Guru.
Not only did Greenbaum misidentify a few key points about the cards in that video, but weeks after selling to Logan Paul he sold a $375,000 box of cards to YouTubers “Dumb Money” and they turned out to be fake. We are not saying that Greenbaum himself was the cause of this Pokémon Card meltdown, but you can watch a video below by PaymoneyWubby that explains that situation a little further.
All we are saying is that he was already in shaky standing in a different community. Therefore, it is not too surprising to learn that Logan Paul might have turned his back on his former Pokémon expert. But it’s also worth questioning why Paul partnered up with Greenbaum for CryptoZoo in the first place. Of course, it could have been Paul giving Greenbaum the benefit of the doubt and the CryptoZoo situation might have been the last straw. However, it also seems a little weird that the other three people had actual roles whereas Greenbaum was an advisor.
So is Coffeezilla wrong for portraying the series of events as one-sided as he did and for allegedly not contacting Paul himself? Yes, he probably is, but it does not rule out wrongdoing on the part of Paul. He was and is the public face of CryptoZoo, and he used his public image to sell the game. But it does seem like his main intent was to make an actual fun game that players could use to earn money, for his own financial purposes. Yet, that goal was not achieved, with Paul’s video ending with a 2023/2024 release date for the platform.
At the end of the day, it does seem like people were defrauded, that at least some of the founders schemed to make money off the project they were starting and that Coffeezilla might have defamed Paul by selectively leaving out information that he probably should have included and by not reaching out to Paul himself. But, it also seems like the reason Coffeezilla gives for starting the investigation, that Paul has not talked about it despite his public promotion of CryptoZoo, is actually valid as well.
It’s unlikely we will hear any more from this story unless Coffeezilla goes on Impaulsive (Paul’s Podcast) or until the relevant lawsuits are filed. But we will undoubtedly update you, either when someone gets sued, or if Coffeezilla puts out a response to Logan Paul’s response.
Published: Jan 4, 2023 11:54 am