Last night I came across another project. The treasury expenditure table was written like a novel’s table of contents—“ecosystem development” took up the lion’s share. But when I checked on-chain, it turned out it was all just paying themselves salaries. I find it pretty frustrating, but I’ve done this kind of thing too—before rushing in, I always felt like, “this time it’s different.”

Now I’ve learned to be smarter. When I evaluate a project, I look for milestones first. I don’t care how fancy the roadmap looks—I care where the money actually ends up. After that wave of on-chain games collapsed, I finally figured it out: inflation is just the result. The root cause is that the team fundamentally doesn’t know how to spend money, or simply doesn’t want to spend money on doing things—first they just feed themselves.

My current version update is roughly: evolved from “this narrative is so cool” to “what these people did last month,” latency went from T+0 to T+7, and they’re still fixing bugs.