The founder of this project did a crowdfund here on the forum and was an active member of this community. He wanted to build his Safe Exchange on the SAFE network but decided to use a blockchain after all. As people still talk about Safex it deserves its own topic so we can move replies about that project to this topic. There is an old topic in #off-topic as well if you want to read more about the history of this project.
Website: safex.io Forum: safe.exchange
Safex is doing very well so far.
But isn’t it heavily, heavily, heavily manipulated?
It may well be, but the fact stands - the coin has performed very well in terms of ROI from ICO.
Whether someone buys your coins due to manipulation or for other reasons, the coins still actually hold the value someone is willing to pay for them on an exchange.
The price isn’t really the value though, the volume depth is. There’s 40btc of orders in total, so if you bought say 2btc of SAFEX at the ICO you’d have about 40M SAFEX coins. That’s well over 100BTC worth, so even with that tiny buy-in, you can’t figure your profit as price*quantity. Even with a $600 investment you could sell it to zero and have most of your coins left. And that’s just one holder with his ‘returns from the ico’, what about all the others?
So yeah, I guess if you bought in for $50 in the ico then it looks like a great return, but it looks less impressive the more you bought or the more you hold due to the ‘liquidity discount’ being HUGE! For those who bought in shortly after the ICO the price has not moved much since it dropped from 400 sats as a ‘SAFE’ based project over a year ago.
Why he changed his mind? couldn’t wait ?
I have no idea, I guess so.
I think he said SAFE couldn’t work because it defied the laws of physics or something. There was no substance or detail, just a lot of vague hand-waving in what seemed like a bit of a melt-down… 
You can read through the thread yourself to make up your own mind, I think Pol linked it in the Op.
If you sell right now, yes, but anyone who wanted to sell a big quantity could have done so during the recent pump that had serious depth at prices far higher than today.
However you look at it, the coin has increased in value greatly since ICO irrespective of any manipulation, and even for those who bought a significant quantity, as long as they don’t just offload everything in one go when market depth is low.