The concept was not a scam, but it appears that Ells and team cannot produce the results they promised in their White Paper and other statements that have been made. They do a good job at avoiding the facts to date, and put blame on anything but their lack of technical capability and competence.
-First they blamed hackers who had stolen users passwords, and delayed the first ICO date.
-Then they blamed time to get HackerOne involved to certify their backend/security
-Then they blamed AWS for not having proper load balancing on their routers
-Then they blamed the holidays and long working hours
-Then January rolled around, and crypto market crashed, so they kind of blamed that for the current price - originally as the crypto market was crashing they blamed people complaining and accused their user base of wanting lower prices so they could buy in lower. Their telegram base of users (moderators) were happy to spout this - blaming anyone who complained of FUD and banning many people.
-Now they are sort of silent and just ignoring the facts while time marches on. Halfway through February now and all they do is push out some notice here and there about some useless MOU's, as if these make the product work. Don't get me wrong - great to have relationships with companies, but they need a product for them to work.
-Funny that people claim Ells is some type of marketing genius, when they should be focusing on the lack of technical progress. The 'built it and they will come' analogy comes to mind. They are 'hype it and they will buy'. But if the emperor has no clothes (tech), it will fail.
Their White Paper had claims of certain things being ready, tested, and working. Not the case.
They have no demonstrated back end capability to handle millions/billions of transactions - they ignore this in every communication they do.
The do not have a working 'mobile miner experience yet'. They are in demo mode with this now. Maybe they have hundreds or even thousands of people doing this - far cry from the millions that they would have to have to make it work.
No paper checking option for wallets - just full import into their own web app or an exchange.
No way for a business yet to transact using ETN.
Many fanboyz on their telegram or other apps that will complain loudly if you point any of this out. Their liberal basement dwelling responses are 'sell your coinz and go' or 'stop spouting FUD'. It hurts their sensibilities that someone might point out the fact that they are useless eaters and that ETN team is lying and obfuscating.
I own a lot of ETN, had hoped it would rise. At this point, we'll be lucky to see .30 to .50 this year, and I'm having significant doubts about it ever reaching $1 or higher in anything other than a Hail Marry pump and dump that might occur due to some hype.
So far the ETN team has let down their many investors - some don't even know it yet.
My advice - sell on the way up and get out of this coin unless they start telling the truth and come clean with their problems. The only thing they spout now are all the MOU's they are signing - which are essentially useless unless they have a working product that these companies can use. If I were a retail business, I'd sign a memo of understanding that I'd use a free or near-free payment product, but it doesn't mean I'll ever use it - it has to be easy, and people have to want to use it. Even Apple Pay struggles mightily and they have a working product, great marketing, and lots of user adoption. Yet it's still easier to just swipe a card in most places. Presently I do not see ETN doing anything of significance, and it's been 3ish months since their first failed ICO release, many months since people invested, and likely months to go until they have anything working. It's quite likely another coin or company is going to muscle them out of the way. If Facebook or Paypal or Amazon or Apple or Starbucks or Wal-Mart goes and does something similar, ETN will be relegated to the trash heap.
They can't even seem to get listed on more than one small exchange. This doesn't really affect their product/promises, but it does affect volume and price, and even notice by folks on the larger exchanges.
The only claim that ETN has is the mobile mining experience, which is barely working in demo mode now, is not on the Apple Iphone, won't work on an unlocked Apple unless it's the foreground app, meaning it's essentially a novelty item. The Android mining demo appears to work in background, but still seems to just stop mining at times, so I don't know if that's a function or feature or bug.
Bottom line - ETN/Ells is doing a disservice by not telling the truth/state of the network and back-end. This leads me to believe that it is destined to fail, but may take a bit of time. His background in MLM means he's used to milking a product for all it is worth and then exiting when all the money is gone. Seems like this is playing out day by day. No working product, nothing to really show - lots of hype. Looks and smells like long-running MLM scam to me.
Spot on, and yet after this here come the fanboys who claim the ICO was successful
I bought into the ICO, was disillusioned with the coin and was very happy to sell off most of my ICO coins at a good price. I did, however, hold on to a small amount simply because of one fact: the team are not allowed to sell their share of coins for a year. This means they will be actively shilling their vapourware til at least the end of 2018. Given how single-minded the fanboy base is, there is still really strong market support for ETN even though they aren't doing very much. I do think I can sell those coins at an even more decent profit down the road. And if I'm wrong, well at least I made my ICO money back.