Article link? You forgot to include the source. I found a different article
here if anyone wants to read that one.
If it was anyone else, I'd be skeptical, but David Chaum is a luminary in crypto. On that basis alone, consider me intrigued. Although I'm a little disappointed with the closed beta. If you want to claim you've built a better cryptocurrency, you should arguably start with the fundamentals of being open-source. As long as they make it public at some point, then I suppose we should give them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they don't want a million-and-one copycat ICOs trying to cash in on their ideas. Hopefully this doesn't become a trend for new projects, though.
Bitcoin has a million and one copycats. That doesn't make it any less of a preferred solution. If it were open source, it would give me comfort about being reasonably safe, or that at least critical errors would be found in the early stages.
Would be interesting to see how this currency starts out, given the established nature of the developer.