In a new video, YouTuber and professional wrestler Logan Paul shared how he purchased an exceedingly rare Pikachu Illustrator Pokémon card from 1998, which PSA grading company rated a minty ten and for which Paul paid a whopping $5,275,000. The video also reveals the harrowing truth: He’s turning the precious Pikachu into an NFT.
Since at least 2020, Logan Paul has enjoyed spending his multi-million dollar fart joke fortune on expensive Pokémon cards, which he then mines for content to amass an even greater fart fortune. Paul introduced his latest flashy acquisition, the $5.2 million holographic Pikachu, to the public by wearing it on a heavy golden chain around his neck ahead of his April WrestleMania fight. He looked like a banana, or to be more specific, a banana with a Pikachu necklace.
I think that’s the name of a Vermeer painting. Anyway, in the video, Paul said that it took him months to acquire the card, which the PSA website says is the only known mint condition Pikachu Illustrator card.
Prior to his WrestleMania stunt, Paul says there was no publicly available information on the mint card, and none of his fart collector friends had ever seen it in person. In February 2021, though, he got an Instagram DM from the owner’s representative saying he wanted to sell.
The seller ended up declining Paul’s initial $4 million offer, but four months later, Paul reached out to a mutual friend and tried making another, more delectable one. They settled on $4 million and a PSA-graded 9 Pikachu Illustrator card, which Paul was easily able to find from a fart collector in his network and buy for $1.25 million.
He forked over the card and the cash to the mint condition Pikachu’s anonymous original owner, broke the Guinness record for “most expensive Pokémon trading card sold at a private sale,” and lived happily ever after. The card itself, on the other hand, will live shivering and crying in blockchain captivity—on July 9 at 3 p.m. EST, it will get listed as an NFT on the “platform” he “co-founded,” Liquid Marketplace.
The platform currently has barely any online presence, history, or information, but shares a mission to “offer collectors the opportunity to co-own physical and digital assets through the power of tokenization” on its about page. I hope that’s convincing enough for you to take out a $5 million loan so you can buy 50 million tokens at $0.10 a pop, which is the price Paul is listing the NFT at on the website.
Paul will be claiming a minority, 49% ownership of the card, meaning it will be stored in a TBD community vault, but he can wear it to more WrestleManias if the majority token holders allow him to. Hey, don’t roll your eyes like that. Paul deserves to extort innocent Pokémon fans in the name of functionally meaningless collective ownership. He’s the biggest Pikachu fan in the world.
I have proof. Before being handed the mint card in his video, someone off-camera remarked to Paul, “Hm. You love Pikachu.”
“Yeah, he’s the best, bro,” Paul responded. There you have it. The greatest mind of our generation, bro.
