Lately, I’m not so focused on whether a project is “seriously getting work done”—instead, I just check directly whether treasury spending and milestones actually line up. Where is the money going: is it continuously paying developers/auditors/infrastructure, or is it a bunch of inexplicable market partnerships, KOLs, and offline parties? Put simply, milestones should be something you can see reflected on-chain or in the repository; otherwise, it’s just writing essays.

When the “play-to-earn” loop—where inflation, studios, and token price spiral—starts to fall apart, you can basically smell it in the spending early: daily subsidies for user acquisition, issuing rewards, but the product itself doesn’t seem to iterate much… Anyway, I care more about whether the money is being spent like building a product, rather than whether it’s being spent like generating hype.

I treat complexity like an enemy: if I can’t understand the money and the progress, I won’t touch it first. That’s how I’ll go for now.