The Rise cryptocurrency price has risen (no pun intended) quite a bit in the last few days which obviously has moved a lot of new eyes to the project. As with any project in the crypto world there is a lot of speculation, and there are a lot of promises. It is always in your best interest to do your own research and not fall for everything you read on reddit/twitter/etc.
I did some research into Rise, and I think it is best to avoid it for a number of reasons:
The main page http://rise.vision loads incredibly slowly and uses images for a lot of text
This may be considered a nitpick, but your presentation is important. This just screams to me that the team doesn’t care about little details, and that their finished product is not going to be very polished. On top of that the images are not even designed to be high resolution to scale up and look sharp for retina displays. The slow load times do not give me much faith in their engineering team.
The page lists a ton of marketing buzzwords and promises about what Rise is.
This is a pretty big red flag for me. It promises so much, but they have delivered so little. The project has been around for over a year, and yet they do not really have anything to show for it.
The roadmap looks like it was put together in photoshop by an intern in about 10 minutes: https://rise.vision/index.php/overview/development/roadmap
It is also an image and offers no dates or additional information.
Their original subreddit hadn’t had a single update for a year: https://www.reddit.com/r/RiseVisionFoundation/
A new subreddit magically popped up about a month ago after no updates at all.
There is only one full time developer on the team
This is another huge red flag. I am not discounting the skills/talent of that engineer cause I do not know him, but you need to have more than one person working on a project this big if you hope to get anything done.
There are not really any github updates
I checked out their github page: https://github.com/RiseVision and for every repository the first commit was in the last couple months. What is worse is the first commit to each repo is HUGE. This defeats the entire point of version control. The most likely explanation about what happened was that the sole engineer worked on these projects for a little bit and never committed the updates to version control and then committed all the work done to that point in a single commit. That is a really poor way of doing things cause it means the commit history is lost for all the work that went in prior to that point. There is nothing that screams “amateur hour” more than that.
Another equally likely possibility is that the code changes were so sporadic since they weren’t actively working on the project that they didn’t want to reveal that to the public so they opted to push all the code in a single swoop.
This is really just scratching the surface. There are a number of other red flags, but this is just what I noticed after doing about 20 minutes of research.
I think the most likely explanation is that the team saw an opportunity to take advantage of the recent boom in the crypto currency world and took it. It seems to be working since the price has more than doubled since they released their promo video on YouTube a couple days ago.
Rise is one of the few projects forked from the crypti project (in addition to Lisk, Shift, Ark, etc). That means that a lot of the work that you see was not actually work that they did, but rather work that was already done. I think Lisk is a lot more promising because it has been under active development and has a very strong community and engineering team.