I haven't followed it closely, but anybody in the know should have heard of the great falling-out among the Synereo team members in the past several months. Apparently their theory guy decided he couldn't do what he said he'd do with the amount of money he said he could do it with, so he quit. Or was fired. I don't remember or really care which.
So now, supposedly, he's gone off to form something called Rchain to implement his nifty whiz-bang sharded distributed scripting engine machine, and he decided he'd run a little fundraiser to get things going. To do this, he tried something weird: send your Synereo AMPs to some address (on the BTC/Omni network), and then you'll magically receive the new IOU token RHOC on the Ethereum network, sent to an address you specified.
I always thought his ideas for Rchain were intriguing at worst and world-changing at best, so I contributed. Not a whole lot of money, but Rchain was the reason I liked Synereo in the first place, so I sent all the AMPs I had. Silly me.
Normally I read all the fine print on these types of things (and normally decide not to contribute once I have, like with that shady TAAS thing), but the redemption window was so narrow that I felt like I just had to do it. When I sent my AMPs to the target address given to me by the redemption website, I had this crazy idea that the redemption process would be the following things:
- Documented somewhere
- Transparent
- Automated
- Honest
We have yet to see about point 4, but points 1-3 are major fails. Huge fails. Embarrassing, unprofessional, just-asking-for-scam-allegation fails. It's even shadier than the original Steem "ninjamine," because at least Steem was documented as code - I could go look up the source and then decide whether to mine. Here, there isn't even publicly-available code that I can read that indicates whether I will or won't be receiving my shiny new IOU tokens.
[EDIT: I have now received my RHOC tokens. There appear to be only a handful of people participating in the token swap, for good or bad.]