Keep an eye on their treasury spending—seriously, you can’t just look at how many weekly reports they published or how many meetings they held. Sometimes the numbers look great, like TVL and user counts that shoot up, but when you check on-chain, you see the treasury sending large sums to market makers or rolling out flashy “collateral unlock” marketing. That suggests the project team may not be confident in their own position and is basically keeping up appearances by throwing money at it.

I lean more toward trusting data, but the premise is that you have to look at those “invisible” signals—such as the frequency of developers’ code submissions and the participation rate in governance proposal voting. I also have intuition. Still, I’ve recently been spooked by the anxiety from token unlock calendars—sell-pressure jitters. Many projects look great on the surface, but on the day of unlock, the “blood-draining” is harsher than anyone else’s. In the end, data can tell me whether they’re truly burying themselves in their work; intuition can only guess whether they’re hiding mines.