I wont walk around the answer in circles - it's not the first option. OneCoin isn't really a cryptocurrency. Whoever put his money into this won't probably ever see them again. Let's look at some of the reasons why.
OneCoin, OneLife - different names for the same trickery
OneCoin, OneLife, OneAcadamy. The project that works on the base of multilevel marketing (MLM) and the proven business model of uncle Ponzi.
Officially the project sells only educational programs that cost anywhere from 110 to 27 500 €. For these you will get some promo materials and tokens that can be used to "mine" OneCoins. These programs are being sold by affiliates who as any most other MLMs get commissions from getting more people on board with the project. And the only way how to make any money back or even get some extra is to recruit more people into the system.
OneCoin has its residence officially in Bulgaria where the main face of the Project Ruja Ignatova lives and where we can supposedly find server on which OneCoin is being mined.
OneCoin is not really a cryptocurrency
Promo texts and videos talk about OneCoin as a cryptocurrency. But no facts do seem to show this being the case.
OneCoin cannot be traded on any open exchange and while the authors say their inspiration came from Bitcoin nothing can be further from the truth. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and a shared system with a decentralized database. It has no central authority and cannot be just shut-down.
OneCoin is a closed scheme that can be shut-down at any given moment by either the owners themselves or the police.
Fake blockchain and a few technical ideas
There is zero evidence showing that OneCoin is using blockchain technology. On the official site you can find a promo video and a few generic points about the power of a decentralized database. The members of OneCoin do get to see how the supposed blockchain loos liek and this is how it looked for the majority of the past year.
As Tim Tayshun who is a looking into OneCoin for some time now says:
- The picture behind "current block is mining from" is a generic image from Shutterstock
- The age of the block is always almost the same.
- The amount of transactions is never higher then 1
- The size of the block is too big for one translation
How long can OneCoin hold?
The life of OneCoin is getting shorter. Just last year were people around this project arrested in China and OneCoin was declared a fraudulent project.
In the past few months were the accounts of OneCoin in Singapur, Italy Cyprus and other counties closed and in Italy the project was recently declared as a Ponzi scheme.
The final question then remains: What will the total damages caused by OneCoin be and whether the organizers will be brought before justice.