Looking to invest in an ICO, or get your hands on some already traded coins? Awesome, welcome aboard! Before you jump in, let me give you some clues to spot shaky projects with examples taken from actual ones. These tips come from my experience (and failures) as well the discussion I had both with friends and the cryptocurrency community.

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The Whitepaper is ALWAYS the most insightful resource

Whitepapers (WP for the rest of this article) can be scary. While some manage to keep it short (~10 pages), others can reach the hundreds yet it’s the best place to gauge the seriousness of a project. It’s still the first thing I check once I’m seriously considering a coin. So what should you be watching closely in a WP?

The English Language

Surprising? Not so much if you put it this way: how to trust an organization unable to put out a flawless WP with a decentralized cryptocurrency project? It might seem small or even petty, but if you find a low-quality English or repeated typos in the WP, you better start running.

Big Promises with technical vagueness

This is probably the most common, as most people won’t read the technical parts of the whitepaper. Even if you don’t fully get the technical details, the difference between a WP trying to cover its lies and a transparent one are quite apparent. SFIcoin is the perfect example of this — DONT INVEST: SCAM, the full recipe is here:

Big promises that don’t mean anything : “The Next Global Paying System”.

: “The Next Global Paying System”. Unbacked claims: their WP that details the vision, the roadmap, the use cases but doesn’t address AT all the tech.

Last but not the least, the SFICOIN is just going to be the first leading peer to peer cryptocurrency to manage the high-value instant payments.

“We will be the first to X” : massive red flag. There are no certainties in cryptocurrencies.

: massive red flag. There are no certainties in cryptocurrencies. A WP made by marketers for marketers lot of visuals, a lot of work on design but overall it’s empty of real meaning.

It’s ok for a WP to get quite technical (here is Stellar’s — XLM), but it’s not OK to cover an absence of technical solution with jargon.

The Darwin Awards of Whitepapers

Wanna see how does a terrible WP looks like? Check Narbonne’s, it’s been 7 months and I can’t find any worse. Out of the 22 pages, ~18 are spitting copy pasta about the future. Most of the paper is very generic, and so many things in it are so off. I had to pick one so here we go, the comparison between Narbonne, Etherium and Wawes. Yes, you read it right, they can’t even spell Ethereum and Waves properly.

So many things need to be debunked in this table, it’s actually a good exercise. Here are a few you do the rest:

“Bookkeeping at the blockchain”: I’m not even sure what it means, but I think a project like Request (REQ) covers this for Ethereum.

“Mobile Banking”: Hello OmiseGo!

“AI, chatbot, voice control”: strictly no use for the project (an infrastructure for banks) but buzzwords so they had to be here!

How does a proper WP look like?

A WP is a technical document usually presenting at least:

The vision for the project / what problem the team is trying to crack, An overview of the technical solutions proposed to the problem and why they were chosen, The details of the technical implementation of the chosen solutions, A credible roadmap for the delivery, Technical information about the token: token type, total amount, token mechanisms… Specifications for the ICO, if any.

To hone your skills, there is nothing better than the OG! I invite you to read the original Bitcoin’s whitepaper written by Satoshi. You can also check: