No working prototype? Weird background team? Fake investors?

IOST is a project just launched on exchanges (Binance, Huobi) last month and it has already peaked at 90millions on the day when it got launch on Binance. It was a massively hype project not just in the West, but in China too.

In this article, I would talk about the 3 main reasons why I think this project is a scam.

Background of IOStoken

IOStoken, Internet of Services token
Official Telegram group: over 50,000 people: It was using the free token Airdrop to get followers
One interesting fact is their twitter account is just started on Dec 2017

Website and Whitepaper

I would say from the first glance, the website is beautiful and the whitepaper looks professional.

A screenshot of their main website. You can see that their vision are quite high, a technology with high TPS, scalable and secure blockchain, and privacy protection. Basically, they are to do everything.

Their whitepaper are full of new and fancy phases, which it is hard for most of the average investors to understand.

While it might be good for a project to have such high vision and it is fine for them to have a fancy white paper, my main concern is there are no proof for the technology. No repositories on GitHub. No working prototype. I think there is no doubt that the token is worth more than actually value, at least right now.

Strong Team?

Seems like many people think that they have a strong team. From the first glance, I would say the background of the team seems very strong - graduated from Harvard, California, Princeton, Tsinghua…

While doing my research, I found a interesting Chinese article talking about the IOST team and below I am going to translate some part of the article.

The writer have found out that the iost project has a big relation with a start up company - Dora

The co-founder of IOST, Jimmy Zhong, is the CEO of Dora. Dora is a start-up company in China - a printing business base on the sharing economy. (and it has nothing to do with blockchain)

`On top is from the IOST page and below is from a` `Team introduction` `for Dora. The highlights showcases the matching part of their profile.`

Not only the co-founder of IOST, Jimmy Zhong, is the CEO of Dora. Others core members of the IOST team were found working/ had worked in Dora as well. (BUT, weirdly they did not list this experience on their Linkin profile)

You can see from this that Dora just a few hundred millions yuan in July 2017 and at the same time CEO of this company is starting to develop a blockchain project.

`IOST Road map`

In the IOST Weekly Update Medium post on 31st Jan (it was after they got found out), they announce that IOST will be partnering with Dora. But why would you need IOST technology, or even just blockchain technology for printing machine? isn't the IOST technology for online service providers? Even though they have admitted that Dora was founded by some IOST team member, many things remained questionable.

( The writer from this article suspect that the team are using the money they got from IOST to subsidies their entrepreneurial project. )

FAKE Investors?

`This is the list for investors and partnership on the IOST website. (screenshot taken on the 3rd Feb)`

One of their listed investor, Banyan Capital, had declared that they have never joined any crypto event on the 31st of Jan:

`Translation: We have noticed that recently some enterprises, institutions or individuals, are referencing Banyan Capital and its logo, in promotion of an ICO or related document. We are here to clarify that, we have never participate din the issuing or trading any tokens and have never collaborate with any institution nor individuals. Also, Banyan Capital had never authorised any entity to use our name or logo in tokens activities.`

Until now, IOST have still not taken down the Banyan Capital's logo off their website. Most importantly, their credibility diminished by this point and other big investor remain questionable.

If you have invested in IOST, I hope you could rethink about your investment after reading this article.

If you are not, please remember this case before you invest in the next to the moon ICO. A good looking website/white-paper and a looks strong team sometimes can still be a scam.

In order to make a scam-free crypto world, we need to become a smarter investor.