Making up for the inexperience of the young men was an older chief executive named Michael Edwards, at least according to the Centra website at the time.

The first cracks in the project appeared in early August when a programmer, Harry Denly, wrote on his blog that Mr. Edwards appeared to be made up. The photo on Centra’s website was a photo of a Canadian physiology professor who had no relation to Centra — and none of the details on Mr. Edwards’s LinkedIn profile, like his work experience at Bank of America and Wells Fargo, checked out.

Centra initially threatened to sue Mr. Denly but then said the bad profiles were the result of freelancers who had hastily put together the company’s marketing material. The LinkedIn profile was deleted.

The company has since removed any mention of Michael Edwards from the Centra site and elevated Mr. Sharma to be president. The company also deleted several other employees whose identity and existence were challenged on social media forums.

“When I got involved, the website got cleaned up from A to Z,” Mr. Sharma said in an interview.

Centra charged past these hiccups and began its token sale, got its endorsement from Mr. Mayweather (more on that later) and moved ahead with its plans for a virtual currency debit card. The debit card was described as a new product that would make it possible to spend virtual currencies anywhere Visa cards were taken. The company’s site showed Centra cards emblazoned with the Visa logo.

There was one problem with this plan. The company had not been approved, or had even applied, to run a Centra card on the Visa network, a spokeswoman for Visa said.

After The New York Times reached out to Visa this month, Centra took all the mentions of Visa off its website. Mr. Sharma then said in an interview that the company had shifted its strategy and was now planning to run its cards on the Mastercard network in partnership with a Canadian financial institution. He said this would not require approval from Mastercard because the Canadian institution would issue the cards.