Recently, someone has been watching large on-chain transfers and hot/cold wallet activity on exchanges and shouting "Smart money is coming." Honestly, I’d rather first see how the code and permissions are written... Despite the excitement, the ones who ultimately take the blame are the smart contracts.

If a newbie wants to judge whether a protocol is "reliable," I usually check three things first: what has been recently changed on GitHub (not just stars, mainly whether it’s maintained long-term and if key changes are explained), what the audit report says (don’t just look for "passed," check if issues were found and addressed, and if there was secondary confirmation after fixes), and who holds the multi-signature keys for upgrades, how many keys are needed, and whether there’s a timelock. To put it simply, before putting money into a contract, find out who can change the rules with a single click; these are closer to "trustworthiness" than just tracking a few large transfers. I don’t take sides either—what’s written into the code is what counts.