Today, 21 st of November, Aphelion official disabled trading on their dex and exit scammed. It's worth to mention that project has been heavily shilled by Ian Balina and Suppoman. Other than that the core team did not spend a single dime and efforts on marketing their product, developing the community and increasing the brand awareness. What they did is deliver a product in order to hit the milestones and walk out clean, without caring whether there will be people using it.

Essentially there were couple of devs and a single community manager named Gareth B who acted as a one man army to calm down unsatisfied investors. It was clear in my mind that this project is likely to exit scam few months ago with their way of operating. Essentially anyone who expressed negative concern and criticized the project was instantly banned from the Telegram Chat.

They came up with a medium release explaining their reasons to shut down:

https://medium.com/@ianholtz/aphelion-disables-mainnet-dex-what-it-means-and-where-do-we-go-from-here-953b4dfa6bb7

Note that they have enabled deliberately the trading of NEX (neon exchange) a security token which isn't allowed to be traded on a regular exchanges without a license.

To conclude, I reckon that this stunt was well thought and carefully planned since the beginning in order to abandon the project in a "legit" way and at the same time walk away with 15 million dollars in their pockets.