Disclaimer: The following is not meant as investment advice, nor is it meant to demean anyone involved in the efforts. The goal is to be as fact-based as possible.
I have been following the release of a new token. It's only been a month since the domain name was procured and the campaign began, and a series of airdrops have been in place as part of a bounty program. What I have been watching will make an interesting cautionary tale, although the end is not yet seen.
The "organization" behind the program calls itself "Reed Elsevier". The token is called "RELX". At first glance, this may seem unexceptional, with one major issue: there is a global company called the RELX Group, which was previously known as Reed Elsevier. The RELX Group is widely known in professional and technical space, is the publisher of major professional journals, runs trade shows, and is the home of the data service known as LexisNexis, one of the best known and longest lived search tools for legal information.
The "Reed Elsevier" website has very little information about the team, no technical whitepaper, and very little else other than buzzwords. The headline, or branding, you see when you first visit the site is "RELX is the World's Best Complete USA Dedicated Token". That is odd, when you realize there is nothing on the website, in their social media, or anyplace else that speaks to USA or "USA dedication", let alone lays out completeness. Hence the mention in the title that USA must mean something other than United States of America ; as I will discuss, it is evidencing itself as a completely un satisfactory airdrop. Reading the ongoing flood in their Telegram feed, it might stand for unstable angina or perhaps one of the more vulgar terms available at https://www.acronymfinder.com/USA.html.
The HTML page title is "Reed Elsevier - The Next Generation Of Social Investments". However, there is little indication of any evolution or how "social" this is., other than claims "your swap is a new form of the governance system, a think-tank where innovation, entrepreneurship, and technological advancements are the priority, creating a much needed utility focus to the blockchain space."
The website lists a contact address that does not resolve to a real place on Google or Bing Maps; there is a phone number with a Missouri area code; the Twitter social media link has been suspended; and the project plan goes no further than next month.
The Youtube channel has a few videos, the most recent on how to withdraw tokens. It is not uncommon for people to take part in bounties, going on their own social media to speak about how great and important the project is, what a professional team, how they will change the world - but other than wondering where their promised bounty is, the biggest question people have is "How do I sell this stuff as quickly as possible?"
The Telegram channel has been a study of chaos and mismanagement. It boasts almost 30 000 members. Not saying that it's not a much smaller number of people with many accounts to get multiple dips into the token giveaway. It is a constant flow of people complaining they didn't receive their base or additional tokens, spammers shilling other airdrops, people saying "Hi" and others hoping to trigger some automated receipt of free tokens.
Tracking where the 10 000 000 tokens are going, the only large movement was 150 000 a little more than a week ago. At a minimum of 10 tokens for the bounty and 30 000 Telegram members, the payment out simply doesn't begin to reflect full payment, given people claiming hundreds due to them due to their referrals.
It has been two weeks from the start of the airdrop and the promised payment date, and a week since the 150 000 moved to start some kind of distribution; although the Facebook page boasts that all payments went out at the last update there one week ago, it's very clear that something is amiss. Yet, they started a second airdrop and bounty. The Facebook page, by the way, was opened February 10, and is managed out of Bangladesh.
I do not have all the facts, of course. And this RELX/"Reed Elsevier" group is not unique. Similar situations happen under names like DryCake (which at least listed a team and offered a whitepaper, but their Telegram channel is almost interchangeable with RELX's), Hyperliquidity, HardPal Swap and others. The latter all went under the same basic byline: "Be Decentralised and Feel Centralised"
