When I first got into the scene, I was also frequently scammed by air coins. Ignoring everything else, I would follow the crowd and pour money into projects that others said had potential, without even reading the whitepaper, let alone checking the team background. As you can imagine—the result was that within a few days of investing, the project team would run off with the funds, leaving only a string of worthless tokens in the account.

After that lesson, I started to think about how to quickly identify promising projects. Not through complex analysis that takes a week to figure out, but with a simple and straightforward screening standard. Now I use these three criteria to evaluate projects, and I can decide in about 3 seconds whether it's worth looking into.

**First: The whitepaper must clearly state "what problem it solves"**

Junk projects' whitepapers love to pile on concepts—metaverse ecology, decentralized innovation, Web3 future… It sounds impressive, but when you ask what real problem it actually solves, they start to dodge. These projects are usually just out to scam. On the other hand, reliable projects may not be as flashy, but they clearly articulate the pain points—what existing issues are, how they plan to solve them, and why their approach will work.

**Second: The core team must be real-name verifiable**

Daring to show their true identity is the most direct test of confidence. Serious teams will publish resumes of core members, past project experience, and industry reputation, willing to be supervised by the market. Teams hiding behind pseudonyms? Usually a bad sign—they're either planning to run away or to make a quick buck and disappear.

**Third: The code must be open source on GitHub**

Open source means transparency. Anyone can review the code to check for obvious vulnerabilities, hidden backdoors, or rug-pull mechanisms. If a project keeps its code in a black box and refuses to open it, there’s nothing more to say.

Going through these three criteria quickly yields results. Over the years, this has helped me avoid more than ten scams. In Web3 investing, instead of spending all your effort trying to make money, it’s better to focus on avoiding pitfalls—each avoided trap means one less loss.