Logan Paul turns $5M Pokémon card into the most expensive trading card ever sold

YouTuber Logan Paul just made roughly $8 million in profit after selling a single Pokémon card. He sold it for $16.49 million through Goldin Auctions on Monday, the most expensive trading card ever sold.

The card dates back to 1998. Only 39 copies were ever officially handed out, and this one carries a PSA 10 grade, the highest possible rating, meaning it has four sharp corners, full original gloss, and no visible flaws. It is reportedly the only copy in existence to have earned that grade.

The buyer was A.J. Scaramucci, son of SkyBridge Capital founder and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci. The sale broke the previous record of $13 million, set in August when a Michael Jordan-Kobe Bryant Dual Logoman 1/1 card changed hands.

Scaramucci made no secret of his appetite for rare acquisitions. Speaking to collectibles reporter Ben Burrows after the purchase, he said: “I’m on a planetary treasure hunt right now. I’m on a quest to buy a T-Rex dinosaur fossil; that’s on my list. I’m going to buy the Declaration of Independence. And I’m not stopping there. This was only the beginning.”

Paul first bought the card in July 2021 for $5.3 million. Shortly after, he raised $8 million to launch Liquid Marketplace, a platform that let people buy fractional digital ownership of physical and digital collectibles. He listed the Illustrator card on the platform in the summer of 2022, offering up to 51% of it to buyers.

That decision has since caused him problems. In June 2024, the Ontario Securities Commission in Canada took action against Liquid Marketplace over multiple violations of securities law, including deceiving investors, failing to register properly, and personal misuse of funds. A hearing in that case is scheduled for June 2026. Paul is not named personally in the lawsuit, though the platform he helped launch is at the center of it.

Paul addressed the criticism in a post on X. He said only 5.4% of the card, not the full 51% he had offered, was actually sold through Liquid Marketplace, raising around $270,000 from fractional owners in the summer of 2022. He bought that stake back in May 2024 at the same price it was originally sold for, as required under the platform’s terms, and said the funds were made available for users to withdraw.

When the site later went offline, Paul said he personally paid to get it back up. “Users are now able to withdraw their funds (and they have been) at liquidmarketplace.io,” he wrote. “They were also notified via e-mail.”

CryptoZoo lawsuit dismissed, but Paul’s reputation still bruised

Legal experts in the crypto space were not convinced. Gabriel Shapiro of Delphi Labs called the arrangement a “classic case of ‘slop tokenization,’” saying the tokens sold gave buyers no real rights to the card itself.

His CryptoZoo project, a blockchain-based game that never properly launched, led to a class-action lawsuit. Paul set up a buyback program for investors who agreed not to pursue further legal action, and that fraud lawsuit was dismissed in 2025.

The total NFT market cap dropped from $3.2 billion to $1.55 billion in just a matter of weeks, a fall of more than 50% since early 2026. Platforms including Rodeo and Nifty Gateway have begun shutting down operations.

The record Pokémon sale tells only half the story. While Paul was cashing in on a piece of physical cardboard, one of his digital investments was quietly dying. Back in 2021, Paul bought an NFT from the 0N1 Force collection, a series of anime-style digital avatar artworks featuring characters in armored suits, for $635,000.

That same NFT is now valued at roughly $155, a loss of more than 99%. Paul himself admitted as far back as 2022 that the NFT was “worth essentially nothing,” calling it an immortalized mistake on X. It has only gotten worse since.

On Solana-based marketplace Collector Crypt, though, tokenized Pokémon cards are still drawing interest. The platform recorded nearly $37 million in volume during the first full week of January, its highest weekly total on record.