Two years after Logan Paul's much-touted play-to-earn game failed to launch, the social media influencer has finally addressed discontented investors by offering to refund their NFT purchases for 0.1 ETH each.
In a post made on X, the YouTuber said, "I am personally committing more than $2.3 million to buy back Base Eggs and Base Animals from every person who intended to play CryptoZoo," adding that "Like you, I was highly disappointed that the game was not delivered."
At the height of the first non-fungible token rush in 2021, Logan Paul announced the release of a collecting game on Ethereum. In his podcast 'IMPAULSIVE' he talked about CryptoZoo being a "really fun game that makes you money," with "hand-made art" and more than "1 million dollars on development."
Sold on the influencer's weight as a public figure, investors rallied to buy "Base Eggs" and "Base Animals" NFTs, which would allow them to buy, sell, breed, and trade "exotic animals" once the game was released. On the first day of launch, buyers purchased $2.5 million worth of eggs, and the game token $ZOO skyrocketed.
Yet, the game never delivered. On the day of launch, the egg NFTs - which were supposed to hatch into animals with different levels of rarity and yield a certain amount of $ZOO tokens - turned out to be nothing more than JPEG images.
In February 2023, the YouTube star and other project associates were hit with a class action lawsuit accusing them of promoting a "game that did not work or never existed" and of having "manipulated the digital currency market for Zoo Tokens to their advantage."
On January 1st this year, the influencer filed an answer and cross-claim response to the class action suit in which he accused two other project members, Jake Greenbaum and Eduardo Ibanez, of having "sabotaged" the game for their own financial benefit.
The payback pledge made just three days later states in the conditions for a refund that investors would be "waiving any actual or anticipated claims against PAUL."
According to lawyer Rob Freund, if this strategy works, it will save Logan Paul a lot of money, as the $2.3 million is way less than what we would have to pay if he lost the class action suit.
A three-part investigation into the Cryptozoo fiasco by Coffeezilla revealed that, while the idea was conceived as a way to make easy money out of NFT buyers, Logan Paul was far from being a scam mastermind. He is, however, a public figure who, by promoting CryptoZoo as "my own NFT project," made it a bigger draw to investors.
So will those investors let one of the world's biggest influencers off the hook that easily, by accepting his payback money, or will they continue with the class action suit? We will continue to Observe.
