We’d love your feedback.
Take a 30-second survey to help improve The Block.
Logan Paul sold his infamous Pokémon Illustrator to A.J. Scaramucci for over $16 million, setting a new record sale price for a trading card. The sale also brought Paul heavy scrutiny from the crypto community due to its prior listing on his Liquid Marketplace platform.
A.J. Scaramucci, the son of SkyBridge Capital founder and former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, paid $16.49 million for the Pikachu Illustrator PSA 10. The previous record sale was $13 million for a Michael Jordan-Kobe Bryant Dual Logoman 1/1 in August.
“I’m on a planetary treasure hunt right now,” A.J. Scaramucci said, according to collectibles reporter Ben Burrows. “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.”
This specific Pokémon card was released in 1998, and 39 copies were officially distributed; it is reportedly the only PSA 10, which means it’s a virtually perfect trading card with four sharp corners, full original gloss, and no visible stains or defects.
Paul, a YouTube star and WWE performer, originally purchased the card in July 2021 for $5.3 million. Shortly after, he raised $8 million to launch Liquid Marketplace, a platform for tokenizing physical and digital collectibles. In the summer of 2022, Paul put the Illustrator card up for sale on the marketplace.
In 2024, however, Canada’s Ontario Securities Commission charged Liquid Marketplace, along with Paul and others, with several violations of securities law. They are accused of deceiving investors, failing to register properly, and personal misuse of funds.
Paul addressed the sale and the controversy regarding its previous ownership.
“I had originally offered to sell up to 51% of the Illustrator on Liquid Marketplace but ultimately only 5.4% of the card was sold for about $270k in the Summer of 2022 to fractional owners associated with LM,” Paul said Monday in a post on X. “In May 2024, I bought the card back for the same price it was sold for per the terms of LM and made funds available for users to withdraw.”
Paul was told that those funds were available to be withdrawn for approximately a year after being deposited in Liquid Marketplace users’ accounts, and he said many of the fractional owners did withdraw those funds at that time.
“For reasons outside of my control, the LM site then went offline,” he continued. “When I learned users could no longer withdraw their funds on LM’s site, I personally paid to get the site back up. Users are now able to withdraw their funds (and they have been) at liquidmarketplace.io. They were also notified via e-mail.”
Pokémon cards recently witnessed another surge on Collector Crypt, a Solana-based trading card game (TCG) marketplace that tokenizes graded Pokémon cards into redeemable NFTs. Collector Crypt generated nearly $37 million in volume in the first full week of January, its highest weekly total ever.
