Answer
Is reward crowdfunding an investment?
Short answer
No. Backing a project buys you no share, no equity and no right to any profit it makes. The most you can receive is the reward the creator offered, and there is no financial return of any kind.
This gets confused because the language overlaps with investing: people talk about backing, funding rounds and returns. In reward crowdfunding none of that transfers ownership. If a project you funded becomes enormously valuable, you own none of it and are owed none of it. You get the reward that was described, if it is delivered.
That is not a limitation we chose to impose, it is what the category is. Equity crowdfunding and lending-based crowdfunding are different regulated activities with different rules, different supervisors and different protections. Reward crowdfunding is a third thing, and describing it as an investment is not sloppy wording, it is a false statement of fact about a financial arrangement.
On CoFunders the boundary is enforced by the program, not by a disclaimer. Money can move in exactly three directions: in from a backer, out to the founder when the goal is reached, or back to the backer when it is not. There is no fourth path that pays a backer a return, because none was written.
One thing on the platform does pay money rather than rewards, and it is worth separating clearly: staking your own balance earns a reward paid by the Solana network for helping secure it. That is not a return on any campaign, we do not set the rate and we do not pay it, and the value of the underlying asset can fall a long way.