The Ultimate Coin and Token Research Guide

This is not investment advice, but is how I perform research on a token or coin. The questions,
advice, and ideas in this guide are used for entertainment purposes only and should not be
taken as legal or financial advice. It should be noted that this is educational in nature on how to
perform research on a coin or token that might help you better understand it, not whether or not
to actually invest in that coin or token.

Goal: Try to make this investment look bad.

The goal of making an investment should be to make the project look bad. Any project can look
good, that’s what marketing is, but if you try really hard to convince yourself that it’s a bad
project… and you’re still convinced, then you may be making a profitable decision.

Question: How many other people are going to buy this coin?

Coins and Tokens are essentially securities. Most don’t have profit-generating mechanisms,
meaning that most will only be profitable if you buy before other people buy. Ask yourself “Can I
see 1,000,000 other people finding out about this coin and buying it too?” If the answer is yes,
you are staring at a very profitable project.

Objective: Make a plan on when to buy and sell.

Now, when it comes to investing, many people have many different strategies. The goal of this
research is to help you form a ‘confidence level’ on a project, which will help you decide what
amount of capital to initially invest in the project. It’s not always wise to ape 100% into a project
you believe long-term, and picking 100 projects to invest 1% each may also not yield profitable
results. I can’t tell you how to base your investment decisions, but I can share how many other
people select their investment amounts, durations, and decide on any changes after their initial
purchase.

This “guide” will be more of a resource to help point you in the right direction. Many of the things
in this guide will be technical in nature, although some won’t be. I advise you to get comfortable
with both, as more knowledge can either make the investment look bad, change your answer to
the question above, and definitely change your plan.
Early Tokenomics

Tokenomics
Tokenonics is a fancy word for saying the economics of an asset. For early coins, there isn’t
much long-term data, so tokenomics is a great source of information. Many times you can view
tokenomics on the project’s website or whitepaper.

The first thing to find out about a coin is if it is inflationary or deflationary.

Inflationary means the coin will continue to be created. Inflationary assets usually decrease in
price as time goes on if nobody buys more, so unless there is a reason to keep buying, the price
will go down.

Deflationary means that the coin will actually start to be destroyed. Deflationary assets usually
increase in price assuming no other changes in the market, because there are less tokens to
buy, so if the demand stays the same, the price will increase.

Some tokens are a mix of these. For example, Bitcoin is inflationary right now because mining
keeps minting more coins. One day though, there won’t be any more coins to mint, and when
that happens it’ll stop being inflationary. We can assume that since some people will lose their
keys, forget their keys, or send to an address that nobody can access… that Bitcoin will
eventually become deflationary.

“Farm Tokens” are special tokens that are given to investors of a yield farm. To incentivize users
to invest their tokens, a developer will create a new token, give it some value, and then print it
and give these highly inflationary tokens to early investors. Watch our video on Degen Yield
Farms to spot these highly-speculative, almost scam opportunities.

How was it presold?

Another important thing to find out is the presale data. This is a term to describe how the token
initially gets out to the public? Was it sold at a price? Did early miners mine the token? Did the
developers give them away to testers of their platforms? Each of these affect the overall
tokenomics.

1) Airdrop?

Airdrops are interesting, because depending on the project and the long-term vision, they could
be good or bad. For example, Uniswap was an airdrop. People who received the airdrop that
held now have around $10,000 worth of UNI tokens.
https://imgur.com/x9KJfD5.jpg

Another aidrop was the GB token airdrop for people who used the ETH -> AVAX bridge. The
token doesn’t really have a utility, and a lot of people who got it weren’t even sure what it was.

https://imgur.com/dfZZ39p.jpg

Finally, another airdrop was ENS. This aidrop was worth from $2000-$10000 depending on your
interaction with the platform. After 2 days, the price went from $25 to $80, and then fell to
around $60 for a while. My personal theory is that big exchanges want to buy a ton of this token
to control the voting power and offer it to their traders, so as soon as the ENS holders sold, the
big exchanges kept the price increasing. ENS is a blue-chip application, and this is why the
exchanges favored it.

https://imgur.com/LDcz7af.jpg

2) ICO

Ethereum ICO?

NEO ICO?

EOS ICO?

Aurora IDO?

3) Premine

Sometimes coins will do ‘premines’ where only certain members can mine the coin. Technically
even if anyone could mine, but only a few people do, then the coins are still held by a few
wallets. The fear of these coins held by only a few people is that one whale can greatly change
the price, making other whales consider to dump. It is good to get information on this.

Premine example

Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool

NEW FAIR LAUNCH MECHANISM
- CopperLaunch

Lockup Period
Many tokens with a presale will have a certain lockup period. This means a specific amount of
time before they can even do anything with their tokens. The main purpose of this is to protect
other users from price crashes. If you can only sell 20% of your initial tokens each month, then
you won’t affect the price as much, and buyers can come into the market to help raise the price.
If you instead had half of all early investors sell their presold tokens, they could easily crash the
price. Make sure to check important dates of lockups. For example, sometimes if an early
investor bought a coin at 1 penny and now the coin is safely trading at 30 dollars, you can
assume that some will sell as soon as they can to lock in their gains. By checking the
whitepaper data and other sources, you can find the specific date on which they have the ability
to sell. You can use this information in 2 ways. For one, if you’re wanting to buy at a cheaper
price, you can wait until after they dump. If you’re trying to cash in on a profit, you may want to
do it before these investors sell.

List of trusted third parties that do lockups:

● Mudra
● CryptEx
● Unicrypt

What network?

Usually most big name coins/tokens follow the main network they are on relatively closely. If
money moves onto the network, then there is more money to easily buy the token, while if
money is moving out of the platform, then it may be due to people selling their tokens.

TraderJoe on Avax example + comparison

Geist on Fantom Example

Initial Price
The price of a token when it first starts can be EASILY manipulated. Here is an example where I
can create a $10m market cap coin with only $1000 real dollars.

1) Create 10 Whiteboard Tokens

2) Create liquidity pool with $1 USDC and 1 Whiteboard Token
3) After pool is created, give the pool $1000 USDC, and you'll buy almost all the
WhiteboardTokens in the pool, but not all of them
4) The new price of Whiteboard Token is $1,012,011 each
5) I now own $10,120,110 worth of Whiteboard Tokens by only using $1000 USDC (and
technically I still own these, since I own the Liquidity Tokens too)

Keep this in mind when a new coin launches. Many new fair launch mechanics are being
developed right now to fight this problem. CopperLaunch is one I particularly have my eye on,
they’ve partnered with Balancer and use a falling price idea to prevent certain launch scams. I
don’t fully understand them, and the true mechanics of what I do understand are outside the
scope of this guide, but they were worth a mention.

Initial Liquidity
New projects are easily manipulated because other members have not deposited liquidity for
you to trade with. To start off trading, the developers will usually deposit their own liquidity, and
then lock it for a certain time period to ensure they won’t pull it out and prevent other users from
selling their tokens. Two ways of locking liquidity are to send their LP tokens to a burn address
or to use a third party service.

Locked Liquidity
Here are some examples of locked liquidity:
- Example 1
- Example 2
- Example 3

Liquidity > Marketcap

In the grand scheme of projects you’re investing in, Liquidity of the token is much more
important than the marketcap. The reason is the same that I mentioned above about how easy it
is to manipulate marketcap. You can also manipulate liquidity, but not to the same extent.

Whale wallets
Anyone can check the blockchain using a blockchain explorer and easily see how many tokens
the richest addresses have. If the top 20 wallets have more than 20% of all tokens, someone is
likely holding a large majority for a while to dump later for a profit. While the developers don’t
have any control over other wallets, large wallets are usually a bad sign.

Remember, some users will split their early buy-ins among many different wallets to make this
impossible to see. Others are not so smart. If you see 10 addresses buying exactly 500 tokens
the first hour they launch, this is clearly a developer trying to trick early buyers that there aren’t
any whale wallets, meanwhile they just hid their 5000 token buy.

bscscan/polygonscan/etherscan
How to check holders
Can sometimes split up into many different wallets
Can check where early tokens went to
Go to first transaction from when the token was minted, check those wallets
Liquidity to trade

Uniswap/PancakeSwap/Quickswap…
Lower liquidity = easier to manipulate
Lower liquidity = nobody believing in project
How to check Liquidity on a DEX and Dex.Guru

Social Media Presence

A simple thing to check for any project is their social media accounts. You can go through their
Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube accounts really quick, just search for them on their homepage.
If they aren’t there, that’s a red flag. When you check their account and they don’t have new
content, that’s another red flag. Lastly, if they have content but it’s not unique, that’s another red
flag. A small number of followers is normal for new projects, but if they are getting an unordinary
number of likes or follows, they may be buying them.

Twitter
Twitter is a busy place, a lot happens every day. What you want to look for here is who they are
collaborating with, who is mentioning them, and how active they are. A dead twitter account is a
big giveaway that the project has dried up.

(how many mentions?, how to check)

Youtube
The main idea here is to check if they creating premium stuff. If they have a marketing team
creating useful videos, then the team obviously has some backing. If they have a YT channel
with a single promo video, it may be one person attempting to look official with a simple budget.
Sometimes great projects have a YT channel with cobwebs, and other times scammy projects
spend way too much on marketing, so use this in supplementation to other research signals.

(good vs bad example)

Also (sort by last week to find creators)

Discord and Telegram

Two of their best social media outlets are Discord and Telegram, and this is because you can
easily reach out to other investors and even the creators. Here you can ask many questions and
find other information from other users.

Two things I usually ask about on a discord or telegram group are locked liquidity and whale
wallets. If they don’t respond or don’t present clear answers, they are probably hiding
something. When someone asks me about WhiteboardCrypto Club, the answers are very clear
and simple because there is nothing to hide.

Reddit
If a community has created a subreddit where members can share ideas and ask questions, this
is a good signal. It’s also a good signal if the community is actively growing and has over 10,000
members.

Medium
Remember to check a project’s Medium articles, and many projects don’t post updates on a
blog or twitter, but will write out in-depth updates on their Medium account. I never used Medium
until I started investing in crypto projects.

Google News
To find things you may have missed, check Google News for your project. You may see
anything from hacks to incentive programs to general PR updates. Most people forget this, but
I’ve personally found unique indicators to help with my research on Google News that I wouldn’t
have found otherwise. This is as simple as Googling “Polkadot” and then selecting the news
category.

Google Trends
Google Trends is a tool that allows you to see total search volume and a few other analytics all
grouped together to see how trendy something is. Usually, the trends correlate heavily with
price, so this is just another tool to keep in mind and check. If the price is way up or way down,
but nobody is search for the project on Google, you may need to do some investigation.

Content Creators

One good signal of a coin increasing in price is content creators on the internet mentioning it.
Even better is if the content creator specializes in this.
For example, I’ve talked to Austin from FTM Alerts and he has a Youtube channel and twitter
account specifically for the FTM blockchain. Although he’s not directly sponsored by the chain,
he does hold a decent amount and continues to create content to bring on new users.

Another example is Taiki Maeda, who has a considerable amount of Twitter and Youtube
followers. When he makes a recommendation, he knows some followers out there will go all in
due to his past great calls. This means his reputation is on the line, so he’s not going to promote
a pump-and-dump, even if it claims it’s not ‘financial advice’.

Seeing niche content creators is a very good sign, especially if they are creating lots of content.
The Shiba Inu Token is another example with an unofficial Youtube account that posts videos
almost daily.

Specifics of project

Unique Ideas

New technological ideas are an advantage. For example, AVAX, Fantom, BSC, Polygon all run
the main Ethereum code called Ethereum Virtual Machine. Each has it’s own unique technology
to run it though, Fantom is a dag, AVAX has sharding, Polygon is like a toolbox of other scaling
solutions… Most tokens offer no new ideas - they are simply a ‘security’ like a stock of a
company where an investment in the token represents an investors belief that other people will
believe in the token as well.

Most of these ideas you will find in the whitepapers of the specific projects you’re researching.

Ideas vs platform

Do they have something built yet, or is it ‘coming’. Many whitepapers include ideas that are yet
to be built, with promises that they will come eventually. Look at their past timelines and
promises, have they delivered?

What differentiates them?

Ask yourself this to identify if your project is unique. Sometimes copycats win, but many times
‘forks’ don’t.
If we think about Sushi, which is a close competitor to Uniswap, they’ve both found ways to offer
unique advantages. Sushi has a unique feature for new tokens to launch, while Uniswap has
specific price ranges for LP investors to select to multiply their fees.

Ohm, Time, and many other forks are very similar in nature. In fact, I think I heard someone say
there are already over 1,000 forks of OlympusDAO. It would be obvious to most people that
these are quick money-grabs with no real differentiation in functionality. People still invest
hoping for a quick buck though.

If a project isn’t unique, and it’s still doing well, find out why. It may not be obvious, but there will
be a reason it does better than it’s copycat competitor. Even if it’s psychological in nature, or the
marketing is different, or the UI just looks cleaner, there will be an edge. In most cases, the ‘first
of it’s kind’ will win big. Apple, Google, Netflix, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Chainlink.

Are they solving a problem?

One thing to think about for every project, is what problem are they solving. Even better, how
are they going to use YOUR money to help solve that problem?

In the case of Bitcoin, it solves inflation. People ask me often “why Bitcoin” and not some other
ERC-20 token or a fork of bitcoin? Well, Bitcoin was the first. When I talk about cryptocurrencies
to anyone, 90% of them have heard of Bitcoin and that is why it may be the best solution for
inflation (even when others can solve it)- it’s just well known.

Ethereum solves expensive/slow banks. Ethereum solve many problems, but the existence of
banks seems to be the main one. You can’t be ‘overleveraged’ with Ethereum. You can’t ‘be in
the hole’, or have a negative account balance. You can send money very quickly. It’s not cheap
right now, but if you’re moving anything over 7 figures… it’s considerably cheaper than a bank.
Nobody asks questions on your moves. Ethereum solves a lot of problems, and it’s similar to
bitcoin in the fact that it’s the first of it’s kind an well known.

Chainlink gives blockchains off-chain information. With the growing space of blockchain
technology, developers are struggling really hard with getting real-world data onto the
blockchain in a reliable and trustless manner. Chainlink seems to offer a solution.

In the grand scheme of things, take a step back and ask yourself “What problem is this project
solving”. Even OHM, which is something I personally think is quite overvalued, solves a specific
problem of a digital reserve currency and protocol owned liquidity. Some problems you may not
be aware of, others you may not understand. I will never invest in a coin or token until I
understand the problem it is solving, if any.
Who created the project? Background?
Some of the best investors claim they don’t have to pick a project based on it’s features, but
rather they pick a person who can do that selection for them. People make mistakes, but the
best builders have spent a lifetime of avoiding those mistakes and working on projects they are
passionate about. If you search through the team of the project you’re researching, and don’t
find any successful past projects or interesting connections, you may want to hold off.

Success follows success, so look to their past. Even before I started WhiteboardCrypto, I started
another channel called Practical Psychology which now has over 2,000,000 subscribers. It took
5 years to get there, a ton of hard work, and many many mistakes. By learning from those
mistakes, I was able to take WhiteboardCrypto from 0 to 500,000 subscribers in less than 10
months.

Sam Bankman Fried helped create and manage Sushiswap, has had many other successful
ventures, and now runs the centralized exchange FTX. Whatever project he starts next, I’ll be
keeping an eye on, because I doubt it’ll be a complete failure.

Marc Andreesen is a famous investor in many crypto projects. You don’t have to be a genius to
realize you can save a lot of time simply by watching his moves, evaluating with your own
personal lens, and then making a decision on whether you should invest or not too. Millionaires
work on increasing their wealth. Billionaires work on keeping it. If they invest in something, they
are doing it because they’ve probably done their research and think at the least, it won’t lose
money.

TokenSniffer and RugDoc.io

You can also use third party tools to check for obvious issues in the project. These aren’t
perfect, but can be used for preliminary screening.

TokenSniffer is a tool that takes a look at the contract code and compares it to all the other
contracts out there. If it’s 99% similar to another one, it means someone copied and pasted the
code and probably is trying to make a quick buck. It also looks for obvious backdoors.

RugDoc is a website/brand dedicated to doing due diligence for you to find issues with projects.
I’m sure they’ve found a way to be monetized, and you certainly have to be careful with what
you trust, but in the past they’ve done a great job at mitigating risk by explaining the project’s
potential flaws to you.

“Where is money coming from?”

Always ask this question. It is one of the most important questions.

For example, when it comes to providing liquidity to Uniswap or even Curve… the money is
coming from traders who happily pay you trading fees to use your tokens to swap with.

For AAVE, the money is coming from borrowers who are also happily paying you an interest rate
on the crypto they’re borrowing from you.

For AVAX, a lot of the money flowing into the system is from inflation. They had an
$800,000,000,000 incentive program, but it wasn’t paid in USD, it was paid in AVAX tokens. This
simply means they are throwing in more AVAX tokens worth $800b to get people using the
network. The money technically comes from inflation, which may show up in the future as a
decreasing price.

With Safemoon, the money is coming from traders who buy in and sell out of their positions.

With BNB, Binance is actually taking a percentage of it’s profits from a real-world business and
using it to buy back BNB.

All of these have different mechanisms to make the token holders and participators money, but
the money is coming from many different places. In many cases, nobody has a clear answer of
where the money is coming from, and that’s when you should dig deeper into your research
before investing.

How has the price done recently?

Can it 10x… or has it already?

If a coin has already 1000x, and the market cap is $25,000,000,000… the potential for it to 100x
or even 10x is much lower due to the natural way the market wants to diversify. The market, on
average, doesn’t want to be 100% in a top market-cap cryptocurrency for many reasons, so
keep this in mind when asking yourself the question I asked in the beginning “Who else will buy
this coin or token after you?”.

How Market Cap works

In the case of this guide, I’m not going to be sharing specific theories on how to predict what a
market cap of a coin will be in x years. Instead, I’m going to give you a different mental model
you can use to evaluate market cap.

Think about it like this “where does this coin deserve to be on the list”.
So does Polkadot deserve to be the #1 coin? Does Bitcoin deserve to be #92? By thinking
about this in generalities we can more accurately make a prediction of where a coin might be by
our previous knowledge of it. Avalanche may not be #1, but I don’t think it should be #1000
either, so maybe #20-#30 is a fair guess. Using these guesses, we can then divide the market
cap by total distribution of coins to get an idea of a fair price.

What is daily trading volume?

Daily Trading Volume is an important number that is worth taking a look at, but I am not yet
educated enough to understand or explain how it relates to price action.

Many experts have their own opinion about ratios of trading volume to market cap, but I don’t
feel comfortable sharing those thoughts as my own here.

Is the price already at ATH? (everyone is in profit)

Remember, when the price is at an all time high, everyone who holds the coin or token is in
profit. If you buy at an all time high, you’ll be competing with many other people to not sell, even
when they have already 100x their investment and have personal bills to pay. I only buy at an all
time high on coins that I am very bullish on long-term. Coins or tokens I expect to do well in the
next 10-20 years, where even an all time high will look like a minor bump in the grand scheme
of DeFi replacing the current banking system.

Technical Analysis
Technical Analysis could take up 10,000 words on specific theories and ideas in this guide. I
won’t be sharing anything like that here, but would advise you to get familiar with common TA
ideas, as many, many investors use them. It may be the case they become self-fulfilling price
action due to simple ideas that are held by hundreds of thousands of investors. You don’t have
to believe in technical analysis, but you’d be a fool not to equip yourself with some ideas that
your competition holds so dearly to their heart they trust their money with it.

Where to buy it?

What big companies list it? When doing your research of a coin or token, make a Google search
and find out which large centralized exchanges offer the coin or token on their markets.

A buyer without a way to buy, is a buyer that wants to enter the market, but can’t. As soon as
they have the opportunity to buy, they will. In many cases, these buyers can really add buying
pressure, and once the ‘gates are opened’, they can drastically affect the price positively.
In many cases, when a coin or token is added to a centralized exchange, the expectation of
price appreciation is usual. One thing worth mentioning here is that usually ERC-20 tokens
aren’t affected as much as new blockchains. This is because many buyers know how to buy the
ERC-20 tokens by buying ETH and using a decentralized exchange, while you can’t get on the
native Bitcoin network without buying Bitcoin itself.

Another thing to note here, is that if a large exchange offers a coin or token, it means they have
done research and allowed their customers to buy it. This includes a vetting process that means
experts looking at the smart contract code, how a blockchain actually works, and other things
even I may not know to check. In short, if a coin isn’t on an exchange, the price may ‘moon’
when it gets added, but it’s also worth noting if it’s not on an exchange, there’s more risk
involved. Centralized exchanges are incentivized to get popular coins added to their list as fast
as possible to make more money on trading fees. What I mean by this paragraph, is that if they
don’t add a popular coin quickly, there must be a reason.

To add
The following topics are topics that require much more research, and that I intend to add to this
document once I have a sufficient amount of information to share on the topics:

● How to find out how much to buy if you want to get in?
● Should I buy more if the price drops after buying in?
● When should I sell?
● How to find new projects?
● How to optimize a portfolio in percentages?