The Pittsburgh Penguins forward and Russian national hockey team player Evgeny Malkin turns out to be involved in the investigation in the United States against a blockchain startup. Malkin not only invested $4 million in the project, but also became the public face and co-founder of the company.

Evgeny Malkin, one of the most titled Russians in the National Hockey League (NHL), in early 2018 invested $4 million in Mark.Space blockchain startup. At Mark.Space, Malkin was invited by Alexander Stokatov, a longtime friend and ex-Metallurg-85 team partner, with whom Malkin played as a teenager. Stokatov introduced Malkin to his relatives, Mark.Space CEO Yana Kontorovich and her husband Anton Tikhonov, who decided to launch the project. In exchange for his investment, Malkin received a stake in two Russian companies behind the project. He got 20% each in LLC UK-Mark and LLC Moda-Mark.

Mark.Space managed to successfully finish its ICO and raise $10 million to finance the project. After the ICO, the token collapsed, and the project team stopped to make any updates. There is thread entitled “Mark.Space is Scam” on the Bitcointalk forum. Mark.Space also lied to its investors about non-existent partnerships with Adidas and Land Rover. Furthermore, Mark.Space founders did not pay salaries even to its own developers. The dev tea announced that they stop working on the project.

According to The Bell, Mark.Space had two foreign legal entities, MarkSpace OU (Estonia) and Mark.Space PTE (Singapore), but none of them received money after its ICO. Oleg Ershov, representative of the project’s development team, told that neither they nor other offices received money from the project team, and Anton Tikhonov didn’t get in touch with them. Currently former partners are preparing a class action lawsuit.

The problem is that Mark.Space tokens were sold, including to retail investors from the United States, while Mark.Space tokens were not registered as securities. Malkin publicly called to invest in the project, serving as the face of the marketing campaign. He also is the founder of the Singapore company.

“Right now, it’s garbage for me. I know I’m a good guy. I don’t know what to say about that, because it’s a little bit crazy (Monday) for me, but I know it’s nothing bad,” Malkin commented.