Logan Paul’s Pokémon Card Sale Has Left A Lot Of Questions

Logan Paul’s sale of the Illustrator Pikachu card last weekend made a lot of headlines, but they were almost entirely based on the extraordinary $16.5 million price paid for the plastic-cased piece of cardboard. However, what surrounds the sale, and the use of prediction market gambling, might perhaps be the real story.

Before we get started, let’s be completely clear: we’re not accusing anyone mentioned of wrongdoing. Lots of questions are being asked, and we are interested in finding out their answers.

On February 15, a weeks-long auction of Logan Paul’s Pokémon card collection came to an end, with winning bids exceeding the market prices for the listed cards by sometimes as much as 70 times. The standout among them was the PSA 10 Illustrator Pikachu, one of only 41 of the card ever printed, and the only one to have been graded a perfect 10; it sold for a record-smashing $16,492,000. That, of course, caused headlines around the world, as it was the most expensive collectible card sale of all time, fetching over three times more than any Pokémon card has ever sold for before.

Unusually, the winning bidder for the card has been identified. It’s AJ Scaramucci, the venture capitalist son of financier and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who bought the card for $13.3 million, and then paid the extra $3.2 million in auction house Goldin’s fees. Even more unusually, Scaramucci is said to have “surprised” Goldin by being in the company’s headquarters in person at the moment the sale completed. As Goldin put it in a press release, “Originally, Paul agreed to personally visit the winning bidder to hand-deliver the card; however, the winner shocked the crowd with his presence as he was already at Goldin HQ.” Thus there was the opportunity for a photoshoot with Paul and Scaramucci as the card was handed over, still attached to its garish chain as worn during Wrestlemania.

Cutting It Close

The obvious question is: why? Why did someone pay quite so much money for something that has no intrinsic value beyond being collectible. The answer, in so many directions, is money. Paul paid $5.275 million for the card in 2022 in an attention-seeking move, and obviously wanted to profit from that stunt. Scaramucci said he thought the card would one day be worth $100 million, so he presumably sees it as an investment. Goldin got to charge a seven-figure fee for hosting a page on their website for a bit. But even after all this, there was more money to be made.

The card started its final night of the auction at $6.3 million, where it had sat throughout the final week of the 42-day auction, a modest increase from the massively over-inflated price Paul paid for the card four years ago. During this last day of bidding it rose to $6.882 million, where it stayed until the last moment. Auctioneers Goldin had predicted the card would sell for between $7 million and $12 million, and had already advanced Paul $2.5 million ahead of the sale (this was featured as part of the Netflix vanity documentary King of Collectibles), so hopes were that it would still climb a little higher. Then, at the last moment, a flurry of bids came in during “an extended bidding period” when it suddenly shot up ten million to the unimaginable price of $16.5 million.

Obviously, anyone who’s tried to buy something desirable on eBay is used to seeing prices skyrocket in the closing few minutes, but this was quite extraordinary. Fortunately, Guinness World Records were in the room to capture the record-breaking moment.

Speculative Betting

Attention then turns to Polymarket, the cryptocurrency-based prediction market where people can bet on absolutely anything they wish, so long as it’s in the future. Ahead of the final day, Polymarket was predicting a 72 percent chance the card would sell for over $7 million, meaning had it sold for the $6.882 million it was sitting at before the extended bidding, a lot of people would have been disappointed.

However, Polymarket’s odds flipped much more in the better’s favor the moment that price went over $10 million. At $8m it sat at 61 percent, but at $10m that dropped to 40 percent. And as for $15 million: surely only a fool would have taken the odds of 11 percent. Because as Oddschecker put it at the time, “This would require a historic bidding war and a sale far above Goldin’s top estimate of $12 million. Traders view this as a long-shot outcome.”

So that worked out rather well for the person who won $265,217 betting it would hit super-high prices, especially given it was the account’s first ever and only Polymarket bet. In total, five bets were placed by the account:

$98,814 at 58 percent for going over $10 million
$154,967 at 42 percent for going over $12m
$131,164 at 17 percent for going over $15 million
$195 at an unknown percentage for going over $18 million
$1,187 at an unknown percentage for going over $20 million

This could look like the betting of a person who felt extremely confident that the price was going to hit between $12 and $15 million, and pretty certain it wasn’t going to reach $18 million, but figured it’d look suspicious if they didn’t put a bet there anyway.

A few people have since raised questions about this, like X user @surgieboi who specializes in eBay actions of sports and TCG collectibles. Replying to Goldin’s CEO Ken Goldin’s boasting during the successful night (along with the most awkward video) as the price went over $13 million “AND RISING,” surgieboi asked, “Was it rising before your $4,000,000 estimate pre-auction (screenshot attached of your own data), or after Logan, I mean the anonymous Polymarket account bet that the auction would cross $15,000,000?”

The reference to the $4 million figure comes from data embedded in Goldin’s website that shows the card was listed with “estimated_value: 4000000.” It’s unclear if this is just a placeholder or something official, and we’ve reached out to Goldin to ask. And indeed whether the auction house has any concerns regarding the Polymarket betting. And just to be clear, we’re in no way endorsing the many claims made by surgieboi in his post.

Liquidated Marketplace

This is not the first controversy surrounding the Illustrator Pikachu card since Logan Paul bought it, and a previous issue came back to bite him after the sale. Keen as the amateur boxing victim is on web3 nonsense, as seen in his experiments with NFTs and forays into crypto, in 2022 he attempted to sell “shares” in the card via Liquid Marketplace. Liquid Marketplace (LM), co-owned by Paul, was an online platform that allowed people to buy an imaginarily-sliced portion of a high-value collectible, and then hope that when it was resold they’d profit along with the owner. And boy, if you’d bet “No” on Polymarket over whether it would still be in good standing in 2026, you’d have made a profit. The Canadian government has accused LM of being a “multi-layered fraud,” saying the company had “misappropriated approximately $3 million, including through hidden payments to shell companies, for the personal enrichment of the LMP Principals.” (It’s important to note that Paul was not listed as one of these Principals, and nor does his name appear anywhere within the filing.)

Paul had attempted to sell 51 percent of the Pikachu card on LM, but in the end only sold 5.4 percent for around $270,000. As the company fell apart, and customers began to panic, Paul says he bought the card back for the original price and ensured buyers that their investments could be withdrawn over the next year. In a recent post on Logan Paul’s X account after the sale, he addressed the controversy noting, “For reasons outside of my control, the LM site then went offline,” but claims he then paid to get the site back up and ensured any remaining money could be reclaimed. Oddly, he never mentions his co-ownership of the company at the center of all the problems.

Shiny Cardboard

A couple of other things of note regarding this peculiar sale. First is to address the grading of this particular card. Of the few dozen Illustrator Pikachu cards that PSA has graded, only one has ever received the gold standard of a 10, with 15 managing a 9 and 12 getting a grade 8. But if you look at Paul’s card, that 10 does feel a little odd. And if you’ve recently tried to get a card graded with the company, you’ll know that something as tiny as an almost invisible print line on the rear of the card is enough to ensure it can’t score a 10. This is a point well addressed by former Blizzard developer Adam Fletcher in a post on X, where he explains in detail how standards at PSA have risen over the years, and especially so in the last couple. There’s no way this card would be a 10 if graded today. It makes the whole thing even more of a folly.

And finally, new owner of the world’s most expensive piece of cardboard AJ Scaramucci has said that it’s his wish for the Illustrator Pikachu to be placed in the recently opened Nintendo Museum in Kyoto, Japan, “and cement it as the ‘Mona Lisa’ of the Pokémon Franchise.” It seems incredibly unlikely, though, that Nintendo would want to pay the insurance.