I know there's been posts like this but I feel like most of them lack some information. I'm making this post to hopefully have a strong guide with everything you need on how to DYOR.

Contents of the guide

• Introduction
• Getting started
• Organizing & setting up a framework
• Evaluating tokens/projects
• General tips
• Tools & resources

Introduction

Do Your Own Research is an acronym that often gets spewed around here as defense of some sort, wether that be cause someone is shilling a coin but doesn't want to come off like it or they are giving information on a project but don't want people to take their research and use it as financial advise.

You often get people telling you to do your own research but it might be confusing as to how to do this properly. I hope that this guide can serve you in helping you do research and I highly advocate everyone to do more of their own research in refining their search for information & valuating crypto's. Use this guide as a rough base and try to refine it with what's important for you.

Getting started

I think the single most important thing to remember when doing research and investing into cryptocurrency is to think for yourself. A large part of doing your own research is making sure that you are getting credible information and all of it. A sponsored video might be great to hear about the upsides of a project but generally sponsored videos do not highlight all of the downsides and drawbacks of a project therefore you ideally want to find a piece of information listing all the negatives of a project. When evaluating your information sources you want to have a good dose of skepticism and ideally look for alternative sources that agree with your original source(more on this later).

It is crucially important to set the stakes for yourself and set a bar for the quality of research you are going to be doing. Are you going to do research because you want to invest in worthwhile projects? If so you might want to take more time researching than when you're just going to load yourself up with some hopium to then do some margin trading. Think of it like this; You're going to be putting your (hard earned) money into the project that you researched with a chance of you losing all of it. Knowing this, are you going to be disciplined and put in some effort or half ass yolo your money into a project?

The last thing I want to say before going on is that this is not politics, this is your money. Often when we talk about politics people do not want to hear anything the other side has to say, don't be like this. There might be times where there are so many promising prospects for a coin that you want to shut off yourself from any opposing takes. It's of the essence to be aware of the risks and dangers when investing into a crypto as much as knowing all of the good things. Be sure not to get trapped in echo chambers (for example go to an anti cryptocurrency discussion board for a change and see what they have to say).

Organizing & setting up a framework

Filtering

It's generally good practice to organize where you are going to get your information from. To get started I suggest going to any crypto news site (such like decrypt), find a popular article on there and find the equivalent articles on other news sites.

For example if I google "Ethereum London EIP-1559" I will get a lot of different news sources and all of the different sites can be used to get my news from.

When I have my list of sites (example: decrypt, cointelegraph, u today, etc.) I'll start googling the name of the site and "review" or something similar like "biased". Most of the times you'll find a trustpilot page where people can leave a review for the website, if a website is too controversial I will generally either discard them as a source of information or use them later on to confirm a piece of news (more on this later).

For youtubers and other influencers it's generally not the same, you definitely do want to see if the content creator you are getting news from is a sack of shit(cough bitboy cough) or if they steer clear from controversy and do not promote random shitcoins for their own gain(cough techlead cough). Another good way to judge creators is to see wether they are getting sponsored by anyone, if a creator gets sponsored to promote a project it's probably best to be skeptical of the video. If this happens repeatedly (i.e creator only makes sponsored videos) you might want to discard them as a news source. Also beware of the sponsors of the channel, if for example Binance is a frequent sponsor of a channel it's probably best to take each video on a Binance project(BSC, BNB, etc.) with skepticism even if that particular video isn't sponsored by Binance.

This might seem tiring and like a lot of work but after you have a good list of credible news sources researching will become easier.

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Direct

It's also very important to get information directly from the project you are researching. This could be reading the whitepaper(very important), listening to team conference calls on certain topics that interest you or getting in touch with the team directly via Telegram or Discord. It's equally important to get information directly from the team as it is important to get your information from third parties like news sites and youtubers.

Again it is important to be skeptic when it comes to information from official project sources, often the people working on the project are very proud of their project and often they are biased. This is not necessarily a bad thing as it is to be expected but always be skeptic.

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Community

This one is not as important in my opinion but for every coin join a community discord, subreddit, etc. and see what the community is like. I tend to steer away from communities that are cult-like and communities that pressure eachother into buying(cough doge cough).

This is really a personal preference kind of thing but it's good to get a feel of what the community of your project is like.

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Framework

I personally work with two frameworks when researching crypto

In the first one I will try to answer any questions / points that I have relating to the project.

• What are they trying to solve / what utility do they have?
• Who is in their team and how is this team funded
• Basic tokenomics (volume, price, market cap, max + circulating supply) << this could be automated using a script
• What field are they in (DeFi, Supply Chain tech, etc.)
• Saturated field? (do they have many competitors)
• Are they a large player in their field?

This might seem like a lot but this can be done easily and provides a decent base for researching crypto.

My second framework is for gathering information it goes something like this

• Find explainer video to get a feel for the project
• Find current things going on on the network (upgrades, new products, etc.)
• Read white and technical papers
• Compare competitors (are they better or not?)
• If it's a utility token (like VeChain for example) look up on some analytics of the field their in (is supply chain in need of better tech, growh forecasts)
• Ask myself wether or not this token is actually useful or not

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Evaluating tokens & projects

This is mostly used as guidelines on how to see wether or not the token has good tokenomics, etc.

First off: * Be prepared to lose some. There can always be something in the future that fucks up the project and your previous research isn't indicative of this. * More reward generally means more risk

There's a checklist of things that I look at when evaluating a project

• Liquidity & volume - If you're working with tokens look for liquidity pools of atleast $50k. This is a high amount and scammers don't usually have this amount of money laying around. For more sophisticated projects see their trading volumes on exchange and see how popular the project is and if anyone else is interested in it
• Holdings - Watch out for whale wallets. If there's a couple wallets holding the majority of tokens/coins ask yourself who these are (is this a foundation wallet or a dev wallet?)
• Community reach - Do they have a twitter, well made website and are they active in talking to their community?
• Red flags - Watch out for anything like "Safe Shiba Doge", etc. This is mostly for tokens but it goes for any project.
• Stay away from pump and dump groups - self explanatory
• Circulating and maximum supply - this is the bread and butter of supply and demand forces.
• Does the coin have any sort of vesting schedule? - Could be indicative of early buyers dumping their bags later (like we see on Algorand which is why the price is supressed)

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General tips

• Read the white paper
• Be skeptical of projects in a bull run. Almost anything goes up in huge bull runs and price increases of projects doesn't mean that they're good projects
• Investing is a risk, set your own limits on how risky you want to invest & trade
• There is no such thing as a free lunch

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Resources & tools

• Messari (https://messari.io) - Very good site for researching, shows a lot of data in only a couple of clicks
• Altcoin Season Index (https://www.blockchaincenter.net/altcoin-season-index/) - Shows if it's a good time for altcoins (btc dominance)
• Glassnode & other market analytic sites - Give you data on what is currently happening in the market
• CoinGecko guides - Coingecko has some excellent guides (like How To DeFi), I suggest reading them and their reports.
• CoinMarketCal - Calendar for crypto related events
• CoinDance & CryptoQuant - Advanced data
• CryptoPanic - News aggregator
• CryptoResearchReport - Good reports with clear language
• Notion - Very good notes app, helps me keep track of my found information

I hope this helped!