It seemed like a happy ending when the last bid reached $16.4 million and confetti began to fall on Logan Paul‘s livestream. A guy buys a rare card. Guy gets three times as much for the card when he sells it. Guy makes eight million dollars and breaks the Guinness World Record. Not hard at all. But it’s not. It hasn’t been in a while.
PSA graded the card as a perfect 10, making it one of only about 40 known to exist in the world. It was sold by auction house Goldin to Anthony Scaramucci’s son, AJ Scaramucci. Anthony Scaramucci is a financier and former White House communications director. Some people say that buying a trading card is the first step in a “planetary treasure hunt,” which is exactly what AJ said. There’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself. The card is truly unique; it was made in 1998 for a Japanese contest and has been almost completely untouched. It paid the price.
The sale, on the other hand, brought back to life something that had been dormant for a few years. In 2022, Paul divided up ownership of the same card on a website called Liquid Marketplace. This made it possible for regular people to buy small pieces of what he wore around his neck at WrestleMania 38. The pitch was strong: own a piece of history and share in its value going up. A total of about $270,000 was paid for fractional positions that covered about 5.4% of the card. After that, Liquid Marketplace stopped working. In June 2024, the Ontario Securities Commission officially sued the platform, and hearings are still going on.
People know that Paul is not a defendant in that case because he has made that clear in public. He said that he had nothing to do with the platform going offline and that he paid for efforts to get it back online so investors could at least get their money back. That might be the whole story. It’s also possible that things are more complicated than anyone wants to say.
The bigger picture makes this harder to figure out. Gabriel Shapiro, general counsel at Delphi Labs, said that the move to fractionalize was a classic example of “slop tokenization.” This is a blunt term for putting something valuable in digital tokens without giving buyers a legal claim to the asset itself. The courts will have to decide if that description is legal. It stuck, though, because a lot of people in the NFT and crypto space saw the pattern right away. This wasn’t the first time something like this had gone wrong.
Paul has pretty much been here before. A class-action lawsuit was filed against him in 2023 for his CryptoZoo project, a play-to-earn game that never quite turned out the way buyers had hoped. In the end, he started a buyback program, made a deal with investors, and the case was dropped in 2025. That resolution shows that someone wants to fix things. But it also leaves a mark that is hard to miss when a new scandal comes up.
When you look at everything from the outside, you almost feel like the record sale isn’t important anymore. A record price was paid for a card that was perfect in every way. Okay. That part is now set. The question of what it means to sell a “piece” of something that you will eventually sell whole is still up in the air. That question will last longer than the confetti, the Guinness judge, and AJ Scaramucci’s treasure hunt. This is the kind of question that courts are still really trying to figure out. A lot of people in the crypto and collectibles space probably wish it had been answered more clearly before all of this started.
