To see whether a project is really doing anything, I now actually look first at treasury expenditures: where the money is going, and whether the spending is steady—it’s far more reliable than their talk of a “roadmap.” To put it bluntly, milestones aren’t those few lines on Medium; it’s whether you can see ongoing delivery + the corresponding cost structure: whether the proportions for development, audits, and infrastructure are normal, or whether, at every key milestone, a sudden chunk of the budget gets eaten up by something like “ecosystem partnerships” or “market promotion.”

Recently, when it comes to L2 “arguing” over TPS, fees, and subsidies, I treat all of that as noise. The more aggressively subsidies are poured in, the more I want to check how many more months the treasury can still hold up—so that in the end, the data may look good, but the cash flow doesn’t just break.

My habit is to make a “backup”: verify the same thing with two or three on-chain signals, because relying on a single piece of evidence makes it far too easy for you to get swept away by a good story… For now, that’s how I do it.