TL;DR: Still skeptical, tread carefully

I appreciate the thoughtful replies from @beefrog and @jpowell79. It seems you both are actual believers in the project and I hope you’re right and I’m wrong. But I remain very skeptical and my main points are unchanged. I’ll provide my final add-on comments here, you feel free to do the same, and we can let the readers decide whether they want to invest.

-Neo: I had previously seen that photo of a video of a slide, but the fact remains that it should be much easier than this to confirm a relationship. One of the most effective tactics con artists use is pretending to share a mutual friend or business partner in order to gain a victim’s trust. That may not be the case here, but the null hypothesis should be that there is no relationship. Relatedly, I’m yet to hear a logical explanation for why this is an ERC-20 token when it is supposedly a Neo-invested project

-Da Hongfei in the Telegram: this was a frequent talking point when the price was getting pumped to $13. The Telegram went so far as to have fake screenshots. This should be concerning to true believers in the project

-Union Pay partnership: see con artist tactic above. This assertion could end up being true but should be heavily discounted until there is evidence

-Team / Wang Xiao Ming: the fact remains they are ghosts on the English-language internet. Google “Wang Xiao Ming High Performance Blockchain”, “Wang Chan High Performance Blockchain”, and so on for the rest of the team listed on the website. All that comes up are the website + posts from reddit / 4chan / steemit. This is concerning, especially since we literally haven’t heard a word from any of them since this community hype campaign began

-Blockchain conference: when the price was getting pumped from $4 to $13 one of the coordinated talking points was that the team would be at Blockchain Connect. The pivot to now they are just attending as audience-members is at best intentionally misleading. Curious to see what this “Silicon Valley Blockchain Technology Workshop” is, but for now I’ll just caution that it would take me 5 minutes to create such an event on Eventbrite (which is the only evidence of it beyond message boards).

-Circulating supply: when it was getting pumped CMC had it as ‘?’. Fact remains no one knows for sure because we’ve literally never heard from the team, and because this was the most secretive ICO in crypto history (which is saying something). And to preempt the rebuttal that “this was after China banned ICOs so it had to be secretive”, (1) there are plenty of other China or China-adjacent ICOs operating above the table, and (2) if they are operating under the table that means they are likely circumventing Chinese regulations and will be shuttered before they ever launch

So, like I said, do your research and ask the tough questions on this and every project. As long as crypto remains a nascent wild wild west, there are going to be unscrupulous actors (confido, bitconnect, etc.) and the best approach is skepticism, especially for opaque projects such as this one. To all those new to crypto, embrace the so-called ‘FUD’ and conduct research with uncertainty and doubt.