Why Revain ICO Can’t Be Trusted

Revain is a service ICO whose goal is to make reviews as honest and transparent as possible. They want to start with reviews of ICOs and cryptocurrency exchange platforms, then tackle e-commerce and booking. We can read that TripAdvisor is worth $6.2 billion and is teeming with fake reviews, but we’re honourable and honest as fuck, so we’ll do everything on blockchain and with two stages of verification to boot. And one will be carried out by IBM Watson itself! The boys have obviously added this famous company to their list of partners. The good thing about the name Revain is that this service is the only thing that comes up when you Google it. The bad thing is the not too flattering meaning of the word “vain”, which is then strengthened by the prefix of repetition. On the other hand, a reply to investors is already on hand: you’ll get fuck all, fuck all, fuck all.

Website

Revain.org. When domains were handed out (everything was as it should be – some were given to elves, others to gnomes, others still to humans), non-profit entities took .org. It’s hard to call Revain that. But whatever.

Eight languages are available: English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Vietnamese, Japanese and Korean. Nevertheless, one of the language names is written incorrectly – “France” – not to mention the poor quality of translation and large swathes of text that remain in English. In any case, there’s a blockchain party and the Chinese, Portuguese and their former colonies, Indians, Pakistanis and Arabs are apparently not invited.

At the top, there’s an embedded YouTube video (less than 500 views in 3 months) featuring a nice chick with a snow-white smile, a melancholic black man with a broken iPhone and the CEO of Revain who gives us a business-like description of how much investment blockchain projects get these days. It’s not very informative – they didn’t manage to get their idea across and wasted their screen time.

Next, we are prompted to try the test version of the service. After clicking the button, you see the exchange rate of the Revain token ($0.18 when this article was written) and a couple of dubious testimonials along the lines of “I thought it was a scam, but took a chance and now I’m making money from the tokens!” Basically, Frank Abagnale, 2017 edition. The test version is like Cthulhu – they say it’s there, but you can’t see it. On the plus side, they suggest you leave your email address on the promise that they will notify you if anything happens to turn up. Apparently, the team members shown on the website in black-and-white portrait photos will be the ones doing the notifying.

Team

There are 13 of them, like Danny Ocean’s friends: CEO, Tech Lead, Backend Developer, Frontend Developer, UI/UX Designer, Project Development Manager, Copywriter, Crowd Sale Specialist, Strategy Manager and 4 SMMs.

On his Facebook page, Revain CEO Rinat Aslanov has written such an epic story that it is worthy of becoming either The Great Gatsby 2 or Wolf of Wall Street: Blockchain Never Sleeps. He lived in Murmansk (a bloody cold city, somewhere between the Wall and the White Walkers), was in the army for 10 years, couldn’t buy a good coat, got upset, left the army, read some Kiyosaki, opened an electronics store with his wife, sold it, moved to Moscow, opened a home renovation company, found a million customers, then in 2017 realised that this wasn’t enough and learned the word blockchain, which turned his life around. Is it even worth mentioning that the distinguished founder of this ICO registered on Facebook in June, when Revain promotional activity started in earnest?

A Google search for “Rinat Aslanov” brings up the social media profiles of a few lads from Bashkiria (an autonomous republic of Russia in the Ural Mountains) and news about the wedding of an Azerbaijani folk musician. So it’s reasonable to assume that the identity of the CEO is fake.

Other members of the team confirm this. The strategist is a guy with zero friends on FB. Which is very sad. Hopefully, this will change when the project completes its global revolution. The SMM girl is Siberian (she knows about vodka and bears first-hand), may even have worked for Red Bull and often posts things on Facebook, although likes, shares and comments are in short supply. We were unable to find any information about the other guys. It looks like an illuminati conspiracy.

White Paper

Twenty-four colourful slides attempt to convince us that classical review services have had their day, so it’s time to round up the peasants with pitchforks and start a revolution. You know, in the Revain system, users won’t cheat to get tokens for useful feedback. They will always be worth 0.0001 BTC all the way up until the second coming of Christ.

By the way, the team has released their tokens on Ethereum – two of them, R and RVN. The former are given to investors (70%), held by the founders (30%) and will soon be available on a cryptocurrency exchange. The latter live only inside the Revain ecosystem, but can be withdrawn and exchanged for other cryptocurrency.

The guys are very proud of their review filtration method and crank up the mystery on one slide just to tell us on the next that the machine won’t accept emotional comments – they’re not constructive. And in their own promo clip the black guy gets sent an iPhone with a broken screen. Place your right hand on the Bible and tell me honestly: can a broken bloody iPhone screen really not arouse emotion?

The second barrier to reviews is the company itself (by the way, you can only leave feedback about Revain’s partners, so if you don’t want to be targeted by the revolutionaries, hide and don’t collaborate with them). It is allowed to withhold negative feedback by explaining everything competently in a public response: “You sent me a broken iPhone” – “If you don’t like it, don’t buy it, arsehole”.

So we have the following scenario: Bobby and Nike decide that normal review services are shit and register on Revain. Bobby bought himself some Jordans, wore them all autumn in New York and left a substantial, glowing review. The artificial intelligence lets it through, as does Nike support. Tokens are taken from Nike’s account and go to Bobby (for his efforts) and Revain (for providing the service). Other consumers read Bobby’s comment and buy their own Jordans.

Okay. But what happens if a competitor decides to sully Nike’s good name and praise itself? The company will recruit smart contractors of different genders, ages and psychetypes to write with spelling mistakes, sophistication and mood swings to launch a discussion that would be a match for Billy Milligan’s 24 personalities. The 24 pages of White Paper have no convincing answer to how blockchain can prevent this mess. A reward of 0.0001 BTC is not the holy grail. Such encouragement has long existed on shopping sites. Then again, if the value of Bitcoin continues to grow steadily, it will be cool and profitable to write reviews for Revain, while client companies will rapidly go bankrupt (1000 reviews a day already cost $1000!). Hahaha.

Social Media

It’s sad that the revolutionaries’ PR is an ill-disguised hoax. All reviews on the site are positive and the Telegram channel is full of messages about how everyone is happy and already making money from selling tokens on the exchange. The Revain page on Facebook is observed by 106,000 people, but their posts get an average of 4-5 likes. The “Publications” section has links to articles that are headed with large letters stating “this is promotional material for which we are not responsible”.

Road Map and Budget Allocation

By the way, the Revain team plans to spend 55% of investment on marketing. If they continue in the same vein, they’ll be able to buy up all the bots in the world, and there will still be enough left over to hire some alien heptapods. In comparison with this, the 5% allocated to infrastructure in the budget looks very funny indeed. Especially when the Road Map plans future offices in Moscow, London and Singapore. Our boys intend to complete their revolution of the review world in early 2019, when they collect more than 8,000 BTC. With the current Bitcoin exchange rate, about 40 million dollars will go on marketing. For reference, Apple spends $1bn on it. And 6 times more on research and development. But this doesn’t really seem to bother the Revain functionaries.

Verdict

Blockchain really is cool. We are not even ready to fully understand how much more can be done with this technology. But in order to understand how illogical and useless the Revain ICO undertaking is, a brief examination and minimal analysis are enough. Its creators have failed at everything it is possible to fail at: the idea, the prototype, social media marketing and the team’s reputation. If anyone gives them money, it’ll be some African soldier who made his fortune from blood diamonds, an alcoholic sports star or a good Buddha. This whole rigmarole was most likely dreamt up with people like that in mind. But money is money, and the team will quickly round it up and vanish into the distance.

So be careful with your investments, read our ICO reviews and leave feedback. They might be free, but they genuinely are fair and transparent… Honest!