How to properly research a cryptocurrency and blockchain project

Many people will tell you to look at the white paper. Find out what the blockchain crypto project is doing. I do agree that this is an important step to take; however, reading a white paper takes way too much time and I don’t think this is the proper first step to take. By following my steps below, you can save a lot of time.

1. Determine if you’re attracted to the project

Before wasting any time on researching, make sure there’s enough project attraction. Go onto the project’s website and get an idea of what the project is about and what they are looking to do. Most projects will have a paragraph summarizing the project’s vision.

2. Who is on the project?

It is so important to not get into a scam project. The best way to avoid this is to find out who are the people involve in the project. Who are the founders? Who are the developers? Who are the investors? Who has the project establish partnerships with?

When you find the people and parties involved, you want to check their Linkedin profile and look at their history, look at their skillsets and are people endorsing them, and what other groups is this person involved in.
Check their Twitter accounts, what is the person posting. Make sure that all the accounts are not newly created.
And do a quick Google search on each person’s background. Make sure you’re confident in the project team before moving onto the next step.

Check out the video for a video explanation of this blog post.

3. Prototypes, Demos, working Product?

Next, look for products, prototypes and demos to see if the project has something to showcase. One thing to understand about blockchain crypto projects is that there is a lot of promise papers and not many projects have actual products or prototypes.

Something that can help is looking at YouTube for information. Look at videos about this project especially on the project’s channel. That’s because, most of the time, on their channel you’ll see AMA sessions, sometimes there are tech demos or game demos, as well as developer updates and much more. This gives an insight on what is being worked on and what products and prototypes are available if any.

4. White paper

Finally, we get to the white paper. If you got this far, then it means you have a lot of interest in the project.

On the white paper, read about the challenges the project is looking to solve. Next, look at the project’s solution and try to understand how the project team is looking to tackle this. Look at the project roadmap, which should let you know the project timeline and how the team have decide on going forward in tackling the challenges with their solution.

5. Tokenomics

Now, this is probably one of the most important steps to look at.
When looking at tokenomics, it is important to look at the circulating supply, the max supply and how was the token distributed among all parties involved in the project. This is important because it lets you know how the tokens are distributed among early investors. For example, you typically don’t want 50% of the token supply going to the project team.

Next, find out if there was a private sale and if there will be an public initial offering. If yes, then find out if there’s a lock schedule or if there is a vested schedule or are all tokens available to the public upon launch?
It is also important to look at the timeline of the token release schedule as this will give an idea of the inflation rate of the token. For example, if the project release 10% of the token upon the token generation event and is expected that the token will get to 100% of the total token supply by the end of year one then that means that inflation will be extremely high. Not financial advise but normally I will stay away from high inflation tokens.

My final comments

Now, if you made it this far into researching the blockchain crypto project then I personally will assume that you like the project a lot. Following these steps will provide some basic generic knowledge of the project. Now, it’s up to you to learn and educate yourself further. From here on out, follow the project on twitter, join their discord and telegram. Sometimes, you get development updates on these platforms or you can find announcements much faster when using these platforms to follow the project. I hope for all the best in your blockchain crypto journey.