I recently went degen hunting, and I'll share my tale of how to spot a scam or a crap project in crypto. It may be more difficult than you think — this is a project with a dev that
— burned his admin keys and locked liquidity,
— had an audited project with no mint function or exit scam backdoors,
— had completed previous projects,
— was doing proper marketing, and
— gave over complete control of the project to the community.
Everything seems to be right with this project, so how does it fail? Garbage projects like rpepe, Xiot, Mantra Dao and BLV that have so much promise but end up losing you money in a bull market can be very frustrating. Let's take a look at this one, Norse.Finance, to see how to avoid garbage in the future.
The Community
The success or failure of projects in crypto is contingent 100% on adoption. This means the community must be tight knit, fun to be around and willing to market.
So when you first research a project, research the community first. Hang out in the room for a second. Take note of who is joining. Is there anyone with a decent following on Twitter (1k-10k followers is decent for crypto)? Do people treat you nicely, or are they a bunch of entitled Western bums "wen lamboing" and throwing up racist memes? If so, that project is probably doomed to fail. The only way to participate successfully in those projects is to have perfect timing, and who has time for that?
The Website
If your project suffers a DDOS attack within minutes of opening, that's a big sign your dev isn't competent. Competency is a huge component in the degen world, where single-man teams rule. Norse.Finance was DDOS attacked early on, which killed its momentum, because it killed confidence in the dev. Even a decent AMA with the dev couldn't save the project, especially because he exhibited bad English throughout the interview.
The Dev
The dev for Norse.Finance and the community both played up past dapp experience. But if you look at the dev's past projects, they all failed. They were still alive, but none of them had been able to hold their initial pricing. The Norse.Finance project was a sad attempt to save those other projects by wrapping them all in a yield farm on Norse. It didn't work. It didn't work because none of the other projects had any adoption or unmistakeable core value. So you'd basically be yield farming useless tokens.
With all of these things working against a project, it doesn't matter how forthcoming or selfless the dev wants to be burning keys and locking liquidity. If the community you attract is complete garbage and the technical flaws in your project can't be fixed on launch, then you have a dead project. Better luck next time. Or actually not. You should work on other people's projects before creating your own again, and check your personality to make sure you're attracting the type of people who will make you look good instead of like a dipshit asshole.
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YOUR GUIDE TO MAKING MONEY IN CRYPTO STARTS HERE ---> Making Money in Crypto Part 1
Always remember:
Burgerswap Bridge will steal your crypto
Deus.Finance is led by a psychotic wannabe despot
AllianceBlock is a shit project
All algorithmic stablecoins (Basis Cash, Mithril, Empty Set Dollar) are a SCAM
Don’t get your bitcoin from PayPal
Trade on BSC, not Ethereum
Ivan on Tech, Elliotrades and Bitboy are complete liars, and
If you are always losing money trading crypto, read here.
Gems I'm investing in:
NFTs - Doki Doki
Trading - Unimex
Finance - Soar
