I look at whether the project team is really doing the work. Besides checking how beautiful the roadmap looks, I pay more attention to how the treasury spends money: Is the money released in segments according to milestones, or is it all gone with no follow-up? Do the expenses for development, audits, infrastructure, and other "boring items" account for a high proportion? Each expenditure has a corresponding deliverable to match (even if it's a commit, testnet, or audit report), and are multi-signature permissions tight enough, rather than just one person blindly transferring funds. To put it simply, the treasury is like a household ledger; if it's messy, problems are bound to happen.

To switch gears, recently there's been a lot of debate in the group about privacy coins, coin mixing, and compliance boundaries. I’ve become even more sensitive: the more gray-area topics there are, the more the project should focus on solid financial transparency and permission management. Otherwise, once you're targeted, the first to suffer are usually not the technical issues but the unclear money flows and permissions. Anyway, I’d rather take it slow than end up having to write an apology statement someday.