There was a huge surge in popularity for the Crypto All-Stars collectible game recently. Much like CryptoKitties the game uses Ethereum’s network and smart contracts to generate unique collectible cards, but they represent some of the most popular faces in the crypto (and crypto twitter) sphere. The biggest “unique” feature of the game was also probably the most controversial one: card prices started at 0.001 ETH and doubled after every successful sale, with 92% of the ethers going to the last holder of the card, 4% to the original character behind it and 4% to the owners of the Crypto All-Start brand/website. This feature was controversial in the meaning that it has a lot of ponzi/musical chair style elements in it.

Because of the nature of the game a lot of the people who gave their names for the cards offered their part of the income to charities or to an organization/foundation of their choice. To name a few:

Charlie Lee to the LTC Foundation

Ricardo Spagni aka Fluffy Pony to GirlsWhoCode

CryptoCobain didn’t disclose the charity of choice yet

And there were a few more.

To give you the whole picture about the amounts of money the game moved, Charlie Lee’s card has been going for ~ 11 ETH at the 14th of February. The problem with these types of games is that there is always someone holding the bag at the end. No one officially denying the accusations versus the mechanics of the game, but we feel that the lack of information on their website and the lack of notices was already a red flag.

Just recently the main face of the project twitter user @nondualnelly aka “Crypto Randy Marsh” announced that he has been locked out of the website, the smart contract and the business by the main developer @surfcoderepeat aka Adam Hedar. Randy stated in the announcement that Adam asks for a buy-out to hand over all the access to the website and smart contracts, because the developer refuses to work together in the future.

Every coin has two sides though, after going through the developers twitter and some relevant channels we found out that the sole creator/developer/idea owner was Adam and that Randy was just the man behind the marketing. Adam complained that Randy wanted to take ownership of the project: Randy invited another friend to the project (who got 10% of the earnings) and also didn’t communicate with Adam regarding the website launch (they pre-launched the website that had still many bugs).

Either way, the biggest losers of the whole debate are the last ones who were holding the cards for 10-20-30 ETH prices as at the moment the Crypto All-Stars website and marketplace has been halted and is non-functioning.