A user asked the following question in the message:
After several times when the evaluation targets did not meet expectations, there would always be two villains fighting in my heart. When one defeated the other, I would always wonder if the winner was really right? If he was not right, how could he prove that he was not right?
I think this reader's message contains a more basic question: How do we select criteria when evaluating a project?
Many problems that arise when evaluating projects stem from the selection of evaluation criteria. Generally speaking, if the criteria are selected appropriately, the evaluation results will not deviate too far; if the evaluation criteria are selected incorrectly, the results are hard to predict.
In the crypto world, choosing evaluation criteria is a very challenging task in my opinion, because this ecosystem has only just started and these projects are still in their infancy. They cannot be measured by traditional standards at all. As I wrote in my article yesterday, we cannot use the profit standards in the stock market to measure existing crypto projects.
My own experience is to find inspiration from the development history of the crypto ecosystem.
In my previous articles, I have repeatedly recommended that you read more classic articles on the crypto ecosystem and historical materials for this reason.
After reading these materials, if we think carefully, we will definitely have various questions about history and the present, such as:
How did Bitcoin develop from a "little toy" to an asset that may become a national reserve asset today?
How did Ethereum become popular and how did it get to where it is today?
Why have the former Ethereum killers failed so far?
What are the development focuses of blockchain platforms and blockchain applications?
Is the sluggish innovation in the Ethereum ecosystem during this cycle a problem of Ethereum or of the entire crypto ecosystem?
If I can ask questions and find answers to them as much as possible, and can use these answers to basically explain the phenomena we commonly see, and even more so if we can use these answers to clearly see the contradictions in the views of some institutional investors or even big capital, then I will temporarily use the standards summarized in these answers as my own standards for evaluating projects.
For example, a recent interview titled "Why is ETH Down so bad?" is worth reading carefully. You may want to take a look at the interview to see if there are any views that you think are fundamentally contrary to the spirit of Satoshi Nakamoto's encryption or are significantly different from the views and standards you hold?
These types of interviews and articles are the best tools to test our views and thinking abilities.
Looking for inspiration from history, I think we can find some additional criteria for evaluating crypto projects, such as:
For the first layer of blockchain (L1), I think decentralization is essential; for the second layer extension (L2), I think decentralization is not as important as L1, but the decentralization of the sorter is very necessary; for blockchain-based application projects, the necessity of decentralization is weaker, and other standards are more important.
In addition to finding inspiration from history, I think we can also learn a lot from some traditional evaluation criteria.
Among the traditional standards, I value two most: one is the leadership team; the other is the user.
Needless to say, the leadership team is important, and I have written about this many times in previous articles.
In my opinion, the meaning of "user" in the crypto ecosystem is broader. It not only includes application users in the traditional sense, but also token holders, and even project developers, as well as the interactions and collaborations between these roles.
Basically, I use these standards to evaluate projects in the crypto ecosystem.
During the evaluation process, if we are not sure about the project, the simplest way is to control the positions involved in the project.
This is especially true for emerging projects.
When our positions are not large, our psychological burden will not be so great, and our mentality will be much better, which will enable us to evaluate projects more objectively and fairly. Otherwise, it will inevitably lead to us worrying about gains and losses and not being able to look at projects correctly.
