CryptoZoo is an online blockchain game that was supposed to be fun while earning you a lot of money. At least, this is what was claimed by Logan Paul, but as the famous dialogue goes, “Reality can often be disappointing.” So is CryptoZoo a beneficial game? Or is it just a big scam? Let’s investigate this matter.

CryptoZoo – A Big Scam

Some people may already know this story, but it goes much deeper. But first, let’s go over where this all started: the Logan Paul podcast ImPaulsive. In an episode of ImPaulsive, Logan Paul talked about this game that he had been seemingly working on for a while and had invested around a million dollars in it.

“It’s a fun game that makes you money…” said Logan Paul.

How Does It Work?

First, earning money from playing a “game” might be new to many people and may sound strange. Well, this game had an exciting system that said promising. So let’s first learn how this game was supposed to make you money.

It starts with you, the user, having to buy a crypto token called ‘Zoo,’ the in-game currency the game uses. Then you use the Zoo points to buy egg NFTs. These eggs can be hatched to become animals, and you can breed these animals together to get Hybrid Animals. For example, producing a Gorilla and Kitten together will give you a GorKitten.

The goal is to get as rare of an NFT as you can, which will result in a higher yield of daily Zoo Tokens that an animal can earn you. You can burn your NFT to get back your original Zoo Tokens if you want.

It Blew Up

With such a promising game idea and one of the biggest influencers supporting it, very few people thought to doubt this game before investing in it. This is why just on the first day, people invested more than $2.5 million in it and bought the Eggs, and the game hadn’t even come out yet. The Zoo Token also reached a 2 Billion Dollar market cap before the game launch; that’s Billion with a ‘B’!

People believed in this project because they believed in Logan Paul. And when such an internet personality releases a project this big, it is evident that everyone wants to be a part of it.

First Red Flags

Logan Paul had promised that this game would be different than others of the same genre. This is because each art piece and NFT was hand-crafted by tens of artists who had put in months of work to design the best-looking NFTs. This was also a big selling point for this game.

When the release date came close, images of the NFTs started being released. And it turns out that these images were, in fact, not hand-made. They were Adobe stock photos that had been slightly edited.

So if the team hadn’t spent much money on Art, where did the million dollars go, which Logan claims were spent on this project!?

Hatch Day

November 3rd, 2022, was the day when everyone could hatch their eggs, called Hatch Day. Everyone in the project claimed that things would take a 180-degree turn on this day.

The Promise Of Passive Income

The game had promised a system where players could earn passively from their animals. But as it turned out, there was no way of actually doing that from the beginning. It wasn’t even mentioned in the contract. The game showed that you were yielding with Zoo, but there was no way of claiming that money.

This means that the game’s core mechanic, the system where you could passively earn by investing some money into the Zoo Tokens, never worked. It still doesn’t work to this day!

Another thing about this game, remember when Logan said you had to buy Zoo Token to hatch the eggs? Well, you could also use Ethereum to get these eggs. So this meant that the previous claim was to inflate the value of these Zoo tokens by getting many people to buy into them.

Lastly, even if you could get your hands on these eggs, you don’t have the option to hatch them. So basically, nothing about this game works.

Zoo

When these controversies started to surface, the price of Zoo went down 63%, and Logan Paul went silent on CryptoZoo. There was no mention from him about this project anywhere on the internet, his podcast, etc. At the same time, the development team kept promising the investors that Logan Paul would start marketing this project any day now. This kept their hopes up, and finally, Logan began to tease a new project he was working on that he had put his heart and soul into.

This was when everyone became hopeful because they expected this “secret project” to be CryptoZoo. But as it later turned out, this was sadly not the case. This project had nothing related to CryptoZoo, but was, in fact, his #99 Originals.

Lead Developer Fled To Switzerland & Holds The Code Hostage

When Logan Paul commented on the situation, he said that his project was having this issue because the Lead Developer from his team had fled to Switzerland and was holding the code hostage for a million dollars.

This sounds suspicious coming from Logan, but it turned out that the Developer had indeed taken the code hostage with him, but it was for a completely different reason. He said he had done it because he had not been paid anything for the project. He had to hire a team of developers for this project and spent around $50,000 weekly on it.

This Developer had been offered a million dollars for doing this project, but when he wasn’t paid anything, he decided to hold the code private and negotiate a deal where he would get born.

Eddie Ibanez – A Liar at The Centre

Eddie Ibanez was the person who was in contact with the development team and the one who had promised them the money. But when investigated, it turned out that this person and his entire story were a lie.

For starters, Eddie claimed to be an orphan who was so bright that he went to MIT and was hired by the CIA. He also claimed to have won the Super Bowl for the Philidelphia Eagles team.

As you can guess, these were all lies since Eddie’s mother is alive and a part of his life. He also never went to MIT, as confirmed by the institution. So if he never went to MIT, how could he have been hired by the CIA, who supposably picked him up from MIT?

This all means that the entire reason why Eddie Ibanez was such a shining character is a lie. Logan Paul’s manager didn’t know this backstory; although he did mention knowing about his lie in the Super Bowl, he hired him anyways.

“He is the biggest reason it failed…” – Jake (Cryptoking), who has been involved with Logan Paul in many of his past projects.

The Game Still Doesn’t Work

Although Eddie was a big part of the problem, he was kicked off a long time ago, and the game still doesn’t work. Logan Paul claimed that fixing things takes time and that it will take some time to fix things up, but it has been a year, and the game still doesn’t work.

Another thing to make things worse is that the team that came on board after Eddie quit working on the project. And their reason was that they weren’t paid for over a month. So this is a pattern that the CryptoZoo team follows: the developers aren’t paid on time, and the investors end up suffering the worst.