The GoNetwork Project Analysis
by Sephiroth
Scam Rating 10/10 (Extremely High)
Once surfing the web I came across this impressive GIF with the shuttle ready to take off. I was curious and started digging into the project to find it has been hyping on the internet since Oct 2017, having more than 70K users on the team’s Telegram channel and a soon-to-be-conducted ICO of something that is mobile and Ethereum. Despite all the efforts, I couldn’t get where all hype was coming from. The project has no visible reasons, no actual documentary and technological basis for becoming popular in the industry. Smelled like a scam to me, and it still smells like it. On seeing that thousands of users together with faithful bots love the idea of a fundraiser, even despite the signs (which are clear enough) of fraud, it is showing, I carried out an investigation of my own. Much was found strange about this mysterious project, that pointed to yet another scam ICO already on its way to stealing investors money.
Part 1. What is GoNetwork and who stands behind it?
The GoNetwork team comprising Amit Shah, Rashid Khan and Xun Cai has made it to the finals along with 7 other teams (though claiming to have won it) of ETHWaterloo, the world’s largest Ethereum hackathon held in the University of Waterloo (Canada) in late October, 2017.
The event brought together over 400 participants coming from 32 countries and saw the judging performed by Vitalik and Dmitry Buterin, Jeff Coleman, Brian Bondy, Joseph Lubin and others.
The Waterloo based GoNetwork team presented the Pocket — a mobile app and a pay system leveraging the Ethereum blockchain. The Pocket is the part of GoNetworks’ platform — a network for Ethereum that is said to help to decrease the cost, while at the same time increase the speed of ETH transactions. Among other platform’s highlights is the GoExchange, a decentralized mobile marketplace for in-app virtual goods for gamers.
The platform is supposed to be already in the development process, with the team, headed by Amit Shah, rushing towards the token sale scheduled for March, 2018. The contributors still don’t have the new whitepaper. Yet, as of the mid February, the project still looks half-baked and abandoned. I’ll give you a brief tour into it.
Part 2. A Website Tour
What’s so amazing about the GoNetwork website? Well, a bit more than nothing.
The home page utilizes a gigantic background photo with Vitalik Buterin looking embarrassed with some of the team members at the front (apparently taken at the hackathon). The page also features the story about the ETHWaterloo stuff, a brief and hard to understand description of the GoNetwork platform and yet impressive GIF with the shuttle ready for take off.
Token sale info is limited to a round diagram depicting the token distribution and token supply details and also the team’s overview along with advisory board. Perhaps, someone believes that’s all you need to know about the project you are about to contribute.
No whitepaper, no ICO start-end dates, no roadmap, or bounty campaign details are available if we take this website for serious. What is also attracting is an outdated call to join the project’s growing Telegram community “of over 50 000 members”.
The last tweet (made on January 20, 2018) on team’s Twitter account is also devoted to reaching this level, while Youtube channel (again) refreshes the warm memories of the ETHWaterloo hackathon.
However, it should be noted, that prior to Jan 2018, the team was active on Twitter, but since then has abandoned it along with Medium account with the latest post made on December 2017.
What is yet to be mentioned is the “TRY MVP” button leading to the page with the screenshot and a link to Github, which is said to contain a list of projects that build the GoNetwork platform. Not a sign of MVP so far. Instead, the description goes on as follows: “Github account contains the GoNetwork’s smart contract stores, that updates and manages virtual goods added by developers. It also contains an AssetManager that has a list of games smart assets — when a user buys, sells an asset she issues the command through the AssetManager. It also has the DAPP, Wallet, Explorer and more!”.
I took a look at it…
The latest repository (10 in total) updated on October 2017, three days after the said Hackathon. Four months ago. And no activity thereafter, no commits, no support. Examining the codes was a complete waste of time. Absolutely. Useless. Unoperational. And. Much of them stolen. What these codes were added for is a good question with no answer.
Here’s a simple example of stolen repository.
This one is published on the GoNetwork’s GitHub account:
https://github.com/gonetwork-project/gonetwork-poc-dapp
And here’s the original link:
https://github.com/davidoevans/react-redux-dapp
Again, almost all repositories are forked or stolen. No activity in the last 4 months, since the hackathon’s end:
Part 3. Traffic, Telegram community and the Reversed Dutch auction
Among other things that got my attention is the traffic. The U.S. turned out to be the top traffic generating country for GoNetwork, followed by China, however it is officially stated, that U.S., Canada, China & Singapore citizens and residents are prohibited from purchasing platform-specific GoTokens. Seems like someone is planning to trick and mess up with SEC.
The team also boasts of having a Telegram channel with over 70 000 users. Indeed there is such a group, and I even had a pleasure of chatting with one of the community managers (Kat).
The first question I asked after entering the channel was about the project’s idea. I told Kat that I couldn’t get what the developing team is working on, and what the “off-chain transactions” are all about?
The question was well ignored.
Surviving dissapointment that followed, I then asked Kat about the ICO start-end dates, the whitepaper and a roadmap, since I haven’t found any at the official website. In response to this Kat sent me the standard copy-paste reply (“be patient, we’re finalising it, stay tuned, bla-bla-bla).
It seemed that I finally got her attention and proceeded with the first question: “what the off-chain transactions are all about”?
The reply that followed is given below:
This looked a bit strange, but I tried to clarify it for Kat now, by telling that it is actually written at the official website:
After sending this confirmation screenshot:
supported with the link (https://gonetwork.co/)...
…Kat banned me mercilessly and got all my messages deleted.
See these empty boxes? This is where my questions used to be. Before they were destroyed.
Other managers are also incompetent, and reply with standard copypaste encouraging you to be patient and wait until the team delivers the updates (dates are not revealed though).
“Four months and no updates will make any follower a dull boy”.
This was my experience. And here’s someone’s else. Pay attention to this poor communication with investors example. Founders are also involved showing total disregard to their concerns. There is a detailed observation of the project with company’s legal info as well. Very smart indeed.
No one can tell for sure what is the exact balance between real users and the army of bots in the project’s Telegram community. The official announcement channel (https://t.me/gonetworkAnn) is a real bot shelter: with approximately 56K users each post has about 180–200K views.
Besides, from my own experience, the secondary channels are usually ten times less populated as the primary ones. Where all these views come from?
Same bot-story with the comments on Youtube, known for its enormous hater audience. Bots are everywhere and not hating. Many of them detected.
The community managers announce that the project’s token sale will be conducted in the form of the Reverse Dutch auction. Since the price will be too high at the start of token sale, it would be hard to conceive that 90% of users are fake. A perfect scheme for scam, I think. It couldn’t have been otherwise.
And finally. This one is absolutely brilliant:
Conclusions
The GoNetwork project is not the case of a trustworthy ICO and not a site it should have in terms of design and contents. No documentary and legal basis (whitepaper, legal opinion), no roadmap, no activity on social media, no updates in the last 4 months (1 month for Twitter), incompetent community managers, no token sale details, no audited smart contract or at least operational code examples, or MVP for a trial.
On the aforesaid basis I assign the highest (10/10) scam rating to GoNetwork project:
Scam Rating Assigned
10/10
Scam Rating
Extremely High
I don’t provide investment advice and that it is only my opinion.
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