Initiative Q: What is it? Is it a scam?

Social media's got itself a new trend, but it doesn't ask you to post a video of you chucking a bucket of ice on yourself, or doing 20 push-ups – instead, it asks you to sign up to a new financial network called Initiative Q.

But what is it exactly? And should you get involved?

The project that calls itself "tomorrow's payment network" but as yet, there's no tangible product to be seen, nor is any being built for the moment, it seems.

Launched in April this year it uses a clever marketing method to acquire new users and so far has 35,000 followers on Twitter, 81,000 on Facebook likes and claims to have 2,000,000 users signed up:

How does it work?

Here's how they get you to join: Sign up with just your name and email, and you get Qs. Invite more people, and your Q count goes up. So far, so pyramid scheme!

However, pyramid schemes normally require you to pay to join. Early members invite new members, earning a commission when those new people sign up. As the number of members grows, the bigger the payoffs. These pyramid scheme companies may offer a product and service, but they primarily make money via these commissions.

Initiative Q told Mashable what it does is different: "The key differentiator is that the potential future gains are a result of the currency becoming widely adopted, not from newcomers paying to join."

"Q is trying to gather a large user base of people who want it to succeed and then building the payment network itself — a network that is not limited by backward-compatibility requirements. Thus, the system itself has not been developed yet, nor is there a test environment."

And so there is no product to talk about, or evaluate, yet so no-one really knows what it is. It doesn't appear to be a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum as no-one is being asked to put money towards anything, but whatever it will become seems very uncertain still.