Recently, when I look at projects labeled “trustworthy or not,” I actually check GitHub first. I’m not focused on how many stars it has—I look to see whether someone has consistently been fixing bugs, addressing issues, and whether version updates are explained clearly. The kind that hasn’t moved for half a year and then, upon upgrading, just tells you to migrate your money over—I get a bad feeling about that.

And don’t treat an audit report as a talisman. The key is to look at what it says and what it didn’t cover, which issues are “known but accepted,” and whether it actually changed anything in the end. Most importantly, there’s upgrade permission: who has multi-signature authority, what the threshold is—how many keys are needed—and whether you can freely modify the contract. Basically, the money is on the chain, but control is in your hands.

These days, the heated arguments around privacy coins and mixers are really the same thing: where the boundary is, and who gets the final say. The more the emotions get torn apart, the more I want to reach into the realm of “verifiable”—calm, mechanical, and just like that for now.