Never Go For the Lowest Effort.

Today on our How to Survive Series we will explore the quite underwhelming world of low-effort/quality/investment projects, why they are bad for your portfolio and why you should avoid them, even in a bull run.

In the previous article we mentioned how low-quality projects are almost as bad as scams, especially due to the fast nature of the DeFi space, and today, we want to dissect this statement more, while giving you a deeper insight into what actually defines a project as low quality.

1: Tokenomics

We see a lot of projects put a lot of focus on the development of a solid and transparent tokenomic plan, and many times we see people newer in the space go against this decision, looking for a faster ROI.

But, that’s one of the main points that separate the wheat from the chaff :

• Nonexistent tokenomics: if this crucial statistic isn’t properly showcased in the lite paper, whitepaper, or the official website of the project you are interested in, simply don’t bother and drop it, there are a myriad of ways in which you can lose your money that’s not even funny.
• One-Sided Tokenomics: if you see a project hoarding all of its tokens, without giving anything else in return, you are probably looking at either a new team or at someone that’s willing to heavily abuse the exchanges they choose to manipulate the price in their favour. The contrary is sometimes true, but the more control the community has the better: the problem here arises if during the TGE there is no solution to counter bots and whales.
• Ignorant Tokenomics: this may seem more difficult to spot, but if you see projects with disproportionate amounts of tokens in a bull run, you already know that they won’t survive the winter: deflation is a real thing in this market, and you have the chance to recognize traps before falling into them, so DYOR and avoid those common pitfalls.
• Tokenomics For Advisors: If you see a team with a good tokenomics plan, reasonable numbers, and a transparent roadmap, check out how many of their tokens are going to their advisors and their team members: if the answer is a lot, you may want to dip from the project, even in this day and age the 51% rule is valid.

2: Team

A strong team pushing out a brilliant idea is the backbone of any project, but with multiple ways to bolster your resume, recognizing real veterans from phonies is not something that can be done with total reliance, nor something that can be done in a couple of minutes.

• Never trust ignorance: If the team isn’t fully public, don’t bother with the project, and with that, we mean that if the project you are following doesn’t provide you with the full name of all of its core members, the risk is too high for continued investments.
• Experience comes in many forms: You will need to check out each team member, what they did in the past in the crypto world, and what they did in the mainstream market before joining the DeFi space: many times you will come back with a strong resume, but sometimes you can also discover that your crypto guru has no experience on the topic whatsoever.
• Focus on the Devs: if you have a team that’s public, with a lot of experience, and backed by a good idea you are fine! or are you? One of the last steps in checking out a team is to look at the distribution of their resources: if their marketing, hr, or content teams are bigger than their Dev Ops, even if the project quality is high, you will see a lot of delays, and generally long waiting times for each new integrations: so focus on the resource allocations!

3: Presentation

While this point may seem lax and sometimes is even a full miss in the context of our discussion, you will save more money than you will lose by simply avoiding all the projects that look low quality. This is something more of a common sense thing than anything else, but many people are entering this market, and thus older pitfalls are valid once again, even those taken directly out of the low-effort drop-shipper book.

• Check their language: this isn’t a holy grail of spotting bad projects, but check their content, look at their main page, and avoid projects that are grossly incompetent in showing off their craft. A single typo means nothing, consistently bad grammar, bad exposition, and bad explanations are all signs pointing out to deeper issues.
• Avoid ADS scams: while not scams per se or in toto, avoid all of those projects that are just pumping flashy graphics, outrageous calls to action, multiple banners that you can click simply by hovering your mouse, and all of those 2014 crapshoots.
• Avoid Social Media Bait: Projects shilled on social media by influencers that aren’t trusted in the community are almost always a bad idea, conduct yourself in a safe manner and thoroughly analyze them before making any movement with your portfolio.

Conclusion

While we believe that this quick guide will have a lot of positive impact, especially for the newcomers in our community, we also know that by now you may have noticed that a lot of the points that we made are heavily related to your experience or to a good amount of common sense.

We, unfortunately, can’t be more specific, simply due to the high variancy that our ecosystem brings to the table. Projects that tick all of those boxes may actually be legit, and projects that cover all their bases may as well just be properly managed scams.

There is no 100% rule, but still, it’s always better to know what to look out for before making an informed decision, than simply tossing a coin and hoping for it to land on your good side.

We will be following up with more specific information on how to recognize the most common networking scams that can happen while browsing telegram, discord, Twitter or even dating apps, and show you some examples of how bad can it be to give up any kind of info to malicious actors aware of what they are doing.

It’s all for today from Synapse, remember to always check out our Twitter account to stay on top of the news, and come visit us on our Telegram page for a direct line of contact with the Synapse team, we hope you will have a better journey in the crypto world following our advice, and we hope to see you again on our next article!

About Synapse Network

Synapse Network is developing a cross-chain investment and start-up acceleration ecosystem based on blockchain technology to give everybody an equal chance to contribute to great upcoming projects and to do so early on. We are bridging the gap between the traditional & crypto market. The idea of the Synapse Network technology goes beyond the standard offer of launchpads available on the market, becoming a true technological brand providing tech solutions.

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