I'll say that it is 100% impossible at the moment to make that determination with 100% certainty right now.

Personally for me there is more evidence pointing towards XBY being real then not, and by real I leave open the chance that the team truly believes they can accomplish what they set out to but falls short in the near term.

One of the biggest things that adds credibility is the decision to get a patent.
There is no reason to say you're going to get a patent if you're going to scam people; if you're trying to obscure the code you can make it closed source. Not only that but at some point you have to obtain patent pending status and people are only going to hang around for so long waiting for that. That means you actually have to file for a patent and people are going to see it.

Other than that pretty much everything can be spun as a mask or facade. The github for xcite, the ramped up marketing, the lack of pursuit of big exchanges, testnet 3, zolt, the new jobs they're listing, active devs on discord, Xfuel, etc.

now imo you have three possible future scenarios that can be assigned a estimated %likelihood of happening for example (making up percentages):
1) XBY is vapor and will fall apart in the next 3-6 months 10%
2) XBY is not vapor but there are inherent problems with the code short term 20%
3) XBY is not vapor and has nothing but minor flaws in the code 70%

Next you look at potential losses/returns for each scenario:
1) lose 50-80% of your investment
2) may go up due to less uncertainty about the team/project and more transparency could also go down so let's say it stays where it's for 3-6 months
3) goes up 5-10x in the short term and will likely end up in the top 20 by main net


Using whatever percentages you assigned you can then determine if the risk reward ratio is worth it, hedge the percentage you assigned to the vapor and maybe the flaw category into a safer project, and continue on with life.


That's just my approach though. Not investment advice and all example numbers are hypothetical.