This is pretty clearly a company practiced at “riding the waves” of what’s popular to sell absolute bullshit.

They appear to raise millions, develop what looks like a minimally viable product for it’s development phase, then pull the rug out and exit with the bag of cash, quickly pivoting away from discovered scams and name changing to avoid too much consumer ire or regulator scrutiny.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the CEO or anyone else at the top levels of this company has an entire resume full of these sorts of ‘scam and run’ operations, the kinds that melt into the background and vanish the moment any real strong consumer or regulatory/legal scrutiny hits it.

Basically this is investment fraud 101; you find something you can trick people into investing into, then spend as little as possible to get a ‘minimally viable product’ that appears plausible enough to give you time to exit stage left with all the fat cash you can take. Because this sort of operation does produce something; oftentimes they get away cleanly; because they did do something and oftentimes they obscure or obfuscate and hide the evidence of any planned malfeasance; usually the only places with any record of it is in the mind of the CEO or other executive(s), if they’re in on the scam too.

Sometimes the CEO gets ‘caught’ intentionally and then fired…or they just run the company into the ground. That latter case can let them off the hook with a tidy golden parachute as well; depending on the circumstances and what they ‘negotiated’ when they were ‘hired’.

I don’t think it’s a scam or a fraud (legally), but it’s really an undercooked assistant that is $170 too much.

I think that CZ has something, but eventually we will have to wait and let it cook, to check how the company (and maybe the device) are entangled with cryptos.