Patrick Shyu

Patrick Shyu built a YouTube following as "TechLead," a former Google and Facebook engineer who dispensed advice on tech careers and Silicon Valley culture with a dry, sardonic delivery. His persona was the jaded insider who had seen behind the curtain of Big Tech and could share the unvarnished truth. That credibility, earned through hundreds of videos, became the foundation for one of the most well-documented influencer crypto schemes: Million Token.

Million Token was presented with an air of technical legitimacy. Shyu, leveraging his engineering credentials, launched it as a cryptocurrency with a supposedly guaranteed floor price of one dollar, backed by his personal commitment to buy at that level. The guarantee gave buyers a sense of safety -- even if the token declined, they could never lose more than their initial investment, or so the pitch implied. On the strength of Shyu's promotion and the perceived safety net, the token surged to over thirty dollars. Buyers piled in, believing they were buying into a project with a credible founder and a price floor that limited their downside.

What Coffeezilla's investigation revealed was that Shyu was selling his own tokens into the buying frenzy he had created. While posting bullish content about Million Token to his audience, Shyu was liquidating his holdings for millions of dollars. The "guaranteed floor" was practically meaningless -- Shyu had no legal obligation to honor it, and the scale of buying needed to maintain a floor at one dollar would have been far beyond what any individual could sustain as the token's market cap grew. The entire construct was designed to provide the appearance of safety while the creator extracted value.

When critics exposed the scheme, Shyu's response followed a pattern seen across influencer crypto scandals: legal threats, not transparency. He threatened to sue Coffeezilla, filed DMCA takedowns against critical content, and attempted to intimidate smaller creators covering the story. A class action lawsuit was eventually filed against him, alleging fraud and securities violations. The Million Token story became a textbook example of how technical credentials could be weaponized to sell a financial product, and how the trust audiences place in educational content creators could be exploited for profit at their expense.