While a white paper should illustrate the vision of the leadership team, it should also detail a certain level of technical assertions that demonstrate a capacity to execute on the vision. While the technical details will shift over time, it’s not reasonable to exclude all technical details because of this possibility. Without a technical outline, it suggests that at the time of ICO there were no technical members on the team. The plan was that they would write some garbage in a white paper and then once they had some money, hire a team of engineers to develop it. Never considering if this was something that was even possible to develop with the current state of the market.

14. No Timeline

A team without a timeline lacks direction. Thinking about the product iterations and providing them for investors gives expectations. This may also be the reason why some teams exclude a timeline. Expectation means the team will be held accountable to a set of deliverables that will influence their success.

The Market & Hype

Marketing is an essential part to business, but there are indicators that illustrate certain teams may be much better at marketing than actually building a product. When you visit social media sites and you become bombarded by a brigade of people shilling the same coin, this is a red flag. There is something going on behind the scenes that needs to be investigated.

15. Over-Hype

Over-hyped projects are common place in the crypto space. Many of these are just that though, projects. They aren’t businesses. By targeting those that don’t understand the technology or are susceptible to blindly promoting coins, these coins skyrocket without much to show for it. When a coin starts to hockey stick in value, carefully evaluate why that is happening. If it’s because of a sudden flood of hype, expect instability in that coins future.

16. Misleading Features

One of the worst hyping techniques that are frequent in this market is when teams market features that don’t actually exist. It should be noted that this is not the same as providing a roadmap with a vision. This is promoting a coin with branding material, claims, and advertisements through features that may never exist.

17. Grand Vision

When a team provides a grand vision, one that will change every market, they better have substantial proof. They should have technical details outlining how exactly they will accomplish something so broad. Without these specific technical details, it’s likely the team is marketing a dream that they have no idea if it’s even possible.

18. Publicity Stunts

There are some teams that seem to be focusing more on announcing partnerships, new features, marketing campaigns, events, and more, when there is no substance behind these stunts. An announcement without a purpose is like a fog horn to a biker. It sounds impressive, but most people should be ignoring these broadcasts.

19. Market Size

One of the overlooked red flags when evaluating a cryptocurrency is the market size. There are a host of coins that are specific in their target market. While capturing a niche market is not an issue, it has become clear that many coins overlap in a way that a more general coin would be preferred in the future. Imagine if there was a coin for buying bread. This might seem like a good investment due to the large market size, until you think about having to use separate currency just for bread. Why not have a more general grocery coin or better yet a general currency? The more general purpose a coin, often the easier it will be to become adopted. People don’t want to switch between hundreds of coins throughout the day every time they want to buy bread, get coffee, download a video, play music, go to the car wash, or shop for clothes. Having a different coin for everything is unsustainable.

The Purpose

The purpose of the coin can provide a lot of insights into if the coin was created to fill a need or simply because the creators wanted to be a part of the craze. There is a lot of money in the crypto space, so this will inevitably attract creators who don’t know what to build, but want to build something anyway just to be involved.

20. Need

The first of these insights is coming across coins that don’t need to exist. If a blockchain doesn’t solve a problem, then it doesn’t need to be a coin. Don’t be fooled by convoluted problems that are simply concocted so the coin can pretend to solve a problem. Simply put, many things still need to be centralized. Most things don’t need to be private.