There are many clear indications that this project stands as an exit scam, and the ICO served as nothing more than a deceptive fundraiser to generate millions of dollars for the founders. Today, the company’s social media channels are dwindling and display nothing but generic advertisements and offers, completely unrelated to the project. Any investors attempting to reach them on social media are met with absolute ignorace.

The value of the token has dropped from 0.1 USD in the ICO, to 0.0005 USD today, almost a 100% decrease in value. The daily volume is borderline non-existant across the meagre selection of exchanges the token is traded on (owing to a de-listing from many exchanges):

The admirable and ambitious promises that were made in 2017 have been abandoned, and never realised. The ‘decentralised ecosystem’ that would ‘give users control over their own data, advertising and analytics services’ consists of a bland, faceless search engine (that returns almost no results) and a vague “vault” that is so under-used it doesn’t even rank on Alexa. The latter page immediately requests deep user verification documents, without truly stating way, and displays spelling and grammatical errors.

This proposal has been made many times before by other software companies, but it’s almost an impossibility to truly disrupt the existing industry, owing to the pure size and power of the companies that dominate the market. BitClave is far too small a company to ever achieve what they promised. In fact, ICO listing websites pose a larger roster of advisors than team members.

Further, there is suspicious in the registry of this company. The staff claim to be located in a mixture of locales, often centering in the US or Russia, yet almost all are Russian by nationality. They claim the ICO is registered in the United States (leaving it open to regulation by the SEC, which isn’t the case – they’re not even registered here), with an address that – for some reason – places them in a university. However, research into the company shows a Singapore registration, made mere months before the ICO would commence. Quite simply, this company was made solely for the purpose of the ICO – an immediate and enormous red flag. Stranger still, the BitClave website was registered in 2015.

The MultiToken Connection

There is a clear connection between BitClave and MultiToken, owing to the two companies sharing many of its staff. There are also comparisons that can be made between the two. Both have promised projects that haven’t been realised, but have gone silent in regard to updates, and both have shut out their investors:

Many of the BitClave staff were (or still are) working with the MultiToken project:

Anton Bukov: Blockchain Developer at BitClave, Chief Blockchain Engineer at MultiToken

Ivan Yurin: Head of Software Development at BitClave, Head of Software Development at MultiToken

Vitaliy Menshenin: Visual Artist at BitClave, UI Designer at MultiToken

Andrey Shashlov: Core Developer at BitClave, Full Stack Engineer at MultiToken

Vasiliy Trofimchuk: Project Manager at BitClave, Founder and CEO of MultiToken

Owing to these points, it’s quite clear that deceptive action has been taken by the team, and there is a strong indication of an exit scam. When the token value bottomed out, the team packed up and went home.

The team claimed that the BitClave token would be earned by “contributing personal data”, by “clicking on search results for products and services from their favourite brands”, and for general use in their BitClave ‘ecosystem’. However, with none of these aspects being realised, the token has no real utility.

The team neglected to clearly explain what would be done with the proceeds of this ICO, and post-ICO there have been no updates on the development of this project, or the distribution of funds raised. There are no clear paths to indicate what has happened to the 25m USD raised, and the team have moved into the shadows with the funds.

They also stated they would retain 50% of the tokens, quite a considerable amount:

They proposed that it would, yes. They proposed a blockchain of retail activities on their BitClave Active Search Ecosystem, but it wasn’t ever realised.

No, this was just an industry-standard ERC-20 token without any real innovation.

Quite simply, this project is rife with red flags and is pitted with suspicious activity. The team have disappeared without a trace and there is no clear indication of where the funds were sent post-ICO. All of their promises have dwindled into nothing, and their endeavoured products are entirely unrealised. There was no way this project would ever have contended with the likes of Google or Bing, and the alleged team behind the project shows they wouldn’t have even had the manpower to get off the ground.

If you have been impacted financially by BitClave’s ICO, please join this class action with confidence.