While no one but social media superstar turned professional boxer Jake Paul and potentially some members of his inner circle know the true value of his crypto holdings, he is apparently now “poor”, his brother Logan Paul, who is also a social media sensation, said in a podcast in May.
Jake ranked as the 6th highest-paid athlete under the age of 2025 in 2021 after raking in just shy of $40 million from his fights throughout the year. But Logan said that “he put it all in crypto” and, given the cryptocurrency markets decline from its 2021 highs, Jake’s investments are likely trading well in the red.
Jake is not the only social media star to have lost money in crypto. Logan Paul admitted on his podcast in May that he had lost more than $500,000 by investing in the ill-fated Luna token, while fellow YouTube star KSI had lost about $3 million in the same investment.
Jake has also been under scrutiny in 2022 for shilling a number of Non-Fungible Token (NFT) and crypto rug pulls, where projects make big promises to would-be investors, take their money, then fail to deliver. Perhaps this is a sign that, with his crypto investments sitting so far underwater, Jake is feeling the pinch and looking for alternate sources of income.
Pseudo-anonymous crypto sleuth Coffeezilla has reportedly been able to connect Paul to crypto promotions and projects totaling $2.2 million.
While Paul has made substantial sums by promoting often doomed crypto projects, there is every chance that he sunk some portion of his fortune into these schemes, not realizing the scam at hand. In that sense, his losses could be ugly.
But Jake is known to have been a long-time fan of what has so far proven to be crypto’s safest bet, Bitcoin. He has in the past claimed that he invested his entire earnings from his first Vine brand deal in the world’s largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization back when he was sixteen and it was trading around $100 per token.
Though, as of Sunday, BTC/USD is trading nearly 60% lower versus its November 2021 highs at $69,000, Paul would still be up around 280x on this investment.
Bitcoin’s struggles in the near-term look for from over, as global economic conditions worsen and persistently high inflation forces major central banks like the US Federal Reserve to press ahead with monetary tightening regardless.
But Bitcoin’s long-term outlook looks very promising, with the global adoption of cryptocurrency payments/investing still looking to be very much in its early stage, and as narratives of bitcoin being a long-term store of value akin to gold and a nascent form of “freedom money” gain popularity.
If Jake Paul put any substantial portion of his $40 million in earnings in 2021 into Bitcoin, he will probably be sitting on a tidy profit by the end of this decade, with many forecasting the cryptocurrency moving into the hundreds of thousands per token, if not hitting one million.
Paul has also in the past praised Dogecoin as “Bitcoin’s younger brother”. The outlook for the crypto community’s favorite meme-coin is far less certain than with proven crypto safe-haven bitcoin. Indeed, DOGE/USD is currently around 90% lower versus its 2021 highs.
But as the likes of Elon Musk continues to tout Dogecoin as a feasible currency, you never know. If Paul put any sizeable portion of his 2021 earnings into the dog-inspired coin and Musk makes it official tender any future SpaceX colony on Mars, you never know!
