I set a rule for myself: when looking at a project, don’t start with the narrative or the candlestick charts—first check how the treasury is spending money and how the milestones are written. It’s not that I want them to save money, but to see whether the spending matches the delivery roadmap—spending money today to buy visibility, then tomorrow changing the PR wording again, with the contract and front-end interactions still full of detours; that’s mostly “putting on a show.” Conversely, even if progress is slow, as long as the milestones can be tied to specific, verifiable things (things I can click, use, and reproduce), then it makes sense where the money is going, and I’m willing to give them more patience.

The recent whole fight over NFT royalties is the same: they say they’re protecting creators very loudly, but look at where they actually put the money—are they smoothing out secondary liquidity, or just trying to treat royalties as a tax-revenue channel… To put it plainly, the treasury books are more honest than slogans.