DYOR is the acronym for Do Your Own Research. It means investors need to do some research on their own on projects they want to invest in. This is because crypto assets are not regulated like other other assets like stock.

A cryptocurrency token can be launched by anyone without any restriction via decentralized exchanges (DEX) or can find its way on a centralized exchange (CEX) with little requirement. Many of these tokens are bad investments causing investors to lose money and no one can easily be tracked for accountability. 

This is why investors are encouraged to DYOR in order to gather as much information to better assess a project. Never rely on the so-called crypto influencers or trendy topics on social media to build your crypto portfolio. Most influencers are paid by crypto projects to promote their garbage tokens to their followers. 

DYOR can be time-consuming but it is worth it. It can help you to find good projects before even most crypto influencers and other investors. Below are some key areas to focus on when you are researching a project.

Project Goal and Project Team

A good crypto project should have a well-defined goal that the project team is working toward. Cryptocurrency technology is very broad with many sectors such as Decentralized Finance (DeFi), GameFi, Move-to-Earn, Memes, and much more. These sectors are still young and have many challenges to overcome.

If you are researching a new project, it's a good practice to try to find which sector it belongs. If you identified a sector, now try to find what value it is adding to the sector. It is trying to solve an existing problem? or is it innovating a new technology? These are some questions you may ask. If you can't find a clear goal for your project, it could be marked as a red flag.

Though most projects won't disclose the team behind them, it gives peace of mind to know this information. Once you find out the team members, search for their tracking record and credibility. Social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube are great tools that could help.

Project Roadmap

A project roadmap is a timeline in which the team lay out developments to be achieved usually in the current fiscal year. Digging into a project roadmap can give you a general idea about the project. 

After you find a project goal, a roadmap should explain how the team plans to achieve this goal. If the project plans to release a major product at some point in time, make sure to keep an eye on this date. Usually, a buying or selling pressure could happen around this date depending on the outcome of the release.

Watch out for crypto projects that don't even care to share their roadmap or have basic things in their roadmap. It makes me laugh when I see things like "Get 10,000 holders", "Partner with top influencers" or "Centralized exchange listing" on certain roadmaps. I mean these milestones are so basics that any project will always want to increase their holder count, partner with influencers, and be listed on a centralized exchange. They don't even need to be mentioned in a roadmap. 

If your project is a meme coin, these basic milestones should make a little sense but even projects based on memes could do better than having these as tasks to focus on. Sometimes, I even prefer meme projects that choose not to release a roadmap and focus on building a good community in the early stages instead. 

Token Value

The value of a token can be summarized as the role it plays in its ecosystem. A token can have multiple purposes such as being used as a currency, giving voting rights to its holder, or being used as a reward in DeFi.

During your research, make sure to find out the utility of the token you are about to hold. This shouldn't matter if you are day trading for profit. But if you are planning to hold it for a long period of time, you should be aware that the price could increase or decrease based on its value.

An important thing to take into consideration when assessing a token is the total supply, the circulating supply, and whether this supply is limited or unlimited.

You can find more information about tokens and tokenomics in this blog post. Link

Social Presence

When I DYOR any project, the first thing that comes to mind is to find out how engaged the community behind. Simple checks like follower count on Twitter, Twitter post engagement, Telegram followers, or blog posts can give me an idea of the community. 

Projects with strong communities tend to do good. Even when the project is just a meme project with no clear roadmap. As long as the community is a die-hard supporter, they keep rolling.

Beware Malicious Token Contract

Checking for malicious codes in a token contract is a must nowadays if you don't want to be a victim of a honey pot scam or other type of scam.

Today, many web tools can help you spot malicious codes in smart contracts. In addition, they can also help you find other important information like liquidity depth, owner wallet holdings, and top 10 holders' wallet holdings. 

This valuable information can help you avoid being scammed, especially when you are researching a project and information about it is very hard to find.