Hello everyone, today I will continue with the series of instructions on practicing Crypto research skills. In this part 3, we will learn about the set of supporting tools (tools) to conduct searches for insights as well as confirm information to ensure the most effective research process.
In part 2, I wrote in great detail about basic analysis skills and divided them into small sections so that you can easily follow and practice. Normally, people will only read articles summarizing basic classified tools, but do not have an overview of their actual use and nature.
In today's article, I will focus on explaining and instructing how to use based on specific cases according to the article frame part 2 so that you can easily follow. I hope all of you have read and learned about the information items I provided in the previous section to easily familiarize yourself with the structure of this article.
** Note: The set of tools I provide are all 100% free to use, and may have limitations compared to popular paid tools on the market. However, each tool we use has a function to serve a research topic, so we use the full set and it is very complete.*
I. BENEFITS OF SUPPLEMENTARY TOOLS
As you know, the research process will consume a lot of time for you, especially newbies. Without experience, the efficiency will not be high, thereby affecting the quality of our coin/token selection for investment/speculation. So when using supporting tools, the above problems will be largely solved:
Save time researching and confirming information
The accuracy of the data is high, thereby improving research efficiency
The ability to cover deeper and broader data provides a multi-dimensional perspective
Practice information reading skills and extract insights
Of course, when you know how to use tools properly, you will have a great advantage over the rest. But most of us don't know how to understand and use the right tools for mom's cooked rice, and few people share in-depth about this topic. So you need to think that we need to practice, we have to learn how to use it, not just throw Nansen at you (what Nansen is, you can learn more about it yourself), then you will know how to use it and take advantage of it. right away.
So the first thing is that once you have learned about it, you must practice using it:
The first is to get used to the habit of using tools to minimize the time spent reading available temple information. Over time, you will become less dependent on this information and learn to read selectively.
The second is to generate your own insights based on data information and present it for verification. We will see our own good and bad things and practice and improve.
Let's compare insights, I often follow articles on twitter, coin98 and listen to Coin68's DeFi Discussion podcast to get more insights from experts. Take advantage of them to train yourself.
So you understand why you need to use additional tools, right? We will continue on the main topic of the article.
II. OVERVIEW CRITERIA ANALYSIS TOOLS
1. Website
In addition to checking the UI/UX of the website to see if it is friendly and professionally presented, you should also check if their domain is malicious or shows any unusual signs. The tools I use here are:
1.1) VirusTotal.com
A tool that analyzes suspicious files, domain names, IPs and URLs to detect malicious software (malware) and other violations of security standards. The criteria are classified in a very detailed and complete way, however you may need to learn more about each item to understand deeply.
Basically, I only choose websites that have 0/xx criteria marked as red flags. If there is even one criterion that is flagged as an alarm, you still need to be cautious. Because it is very possible that there is built-in bad malware that will steal data or record your keyboard input history. In the worst case, they will get the wallet password, leading to loss of assets when you connect to the device. project website.
Example of domain analysis of the Layer3 project (see Figure 2 for an overview). Layer3's website domain has 0/90 criteria flagged as an alarm -> Meets security standards.
1.2) Hypestat.com
HypeStat is a free statistics and analysis site where you can find information about every website. Often hypestat is used to value web domains for businesses, however this channel synthesizes quite detailed information about the number of users accessing (traffic) and distribution by region in a certain period of time. You can rely on this information to see the popularity of that project as well as which areas the users are concentrated in. Based on that information, we can draw some interesting insights.
For example, in the picture, I looked at the domain of DEX Mojito and saw that the traffic mainly came from Vietnam with a rate of up to 53.5% -> Infer what the insights are here, you can draw for yourself.
2. Team & Partners & Investors
For information about the project development team along with investment partners and VCs, you need to confirm whether the information provided from the project is accurate or not. With a few tools below, you can easily update and verify the accuracy of data compared to notifications from the project.
2.1) Crunchbase.com
This channel is extremely popular, from traditional to Crypto, almost everyone knows about it. Crunchbase provides almost all the information you need in the general analysis section of the research. However, Crunchbase still has limitations, such as new projects or small-scale projects often will not have information.
You can use crunchbase to confirm information about:
Team members via twitter, linkedin... can find in the "people" tab, the contact section will be fully displayed (if any).
Specific capital calls regarding time and amount raised for each round, which VCs participate in each round and related news channels in the "financials" tab.
There are some tabs like "technology" or "signal & news" that you can explore more during use.
For example, I am verifying the information about raising capital and investors of the hot Pontem Network project that has recently been sought after by many people to do retroactive work. Pontem raised capital in round 1 for a total of $4.5 million with a total of 18 investors. Scroll down and you can check more detailed information.
2.2) Cypherhunter.com
This tool is also quite popular, I have read some recent articles in the group where the author also mentioned it. In essence, Cypher Hunter is often used by me to search for similar projects that are similar to a project that is leading the trend in a certain niche such as DeFi, Layer1, Bridge, SocialFi, etc. Because cyperhunter has a list of suggested related projects right next to the project we are visiting.
However, besides that, cypherhunter is also a channel that provides quite complete information about the team (twitter) and VCs. I use this feature to support crunchbase if the project does not have information about the development team on this channel.
For example, I search for Aptos and related projects in the system. Cypher Hunter will automatically filter projects in the Aptos system for us by keyword in a quite intuitive way. Now we just need to select the project to research.
III. TOOLS ANALYZE SAFETY CRITERIA
In this chapter in article part 2, I mentioned a lot about smart contracts and liquidity. This information often requires you to have basic knowledge of on-chain indicators, so that when using supporting tools, you will also know how to read the necessary indicators to conclude insights. No need to go too deep, but if you still don't know, please read the on-chain tutorial articles first to get acquainted. I recommend reading the tutorials on The DataFi Vietnam channel (telegram/Facebook)!
1. Audit Smart Contract (Audit smart contract and functions)
For newbies who are not in the habit of checking information, as soon as they read the information provided from project A that their smart contract has been audited by Certik, for example. So we immediately believe and skip the fact check step. I advise that for every information you read on media channels from the project, we need to have another back check step using tools. below for sure.
1.1) Cointool.app
It can be said that cointool is a super set of free tools that I really like. cointool has too many tools and features that are very well integrated, used for both tokens and NFTs. Maybe another day I will write specifically about cointool for you to learn more. In today's article, I will only introduce the smart contract screening feature. The procedure is quite simple as follows:
Copy the token address on a general channel like coinecko, coinmarketcap or dropstab. (If you don't know how to search, look for the article on coin98 and you'll find it right away, guys)
Access cointool .app, on the left-hand toolbar, click on "Audit Contract" (5th item from the top).
From the website interface, you paste the addess token address into the search box and select the appropriate chain then click on the search logo.
An analysis table will be displayed including basic information about the token, detailed risk analysis, pool size, LP holders and Token holders... along with a tab analyzing the code of the smart contract for you to see the features. located right.
Using this feature of cointool is similar to virustotal, just need redflag and the tool will warn you. This back check step also does not consume much of your time while being much more effective than just searching.
As an example, I analyze the governance token "SSS" of the game Starshark.
For cointool, you can explore other features to see how it works, such as creating a new token or creating your own presales token, for example. Through these steps of creating tokens, you can try to Learn more about smart contracts and create opportunities to learn more deeply.
1.2) Tokensniffer.com
Just like the cointool feature above, you just need to copy and paste the token address into the search bar and TokenSniffer will provide information about unusual signs of smart contracts according to each small criteria, etc. The maximum score based on the criteria is 100 points. The higher the score approaches 100, the more prestigious the token is. Theoretically, that's the case, but please note that when you use it, the accuracy rate of tokensniffer is not too high. For some new tokens, information on tokensniffer is often lacking and ineffective.
So why do I introduce tokensniffer in this article? Because it has an “on-chain bubblemap” feature, it basically displays the top 100 token-holding wallets of real users (excluding smart contracts) as small dots (bubbles). Learning to observe the bubblemap will give you many good insights to detect unusual signs from the project such as: unusual transactions, personal wallets holding too much proportion of token allocation in the total supply, relationships irregularities between wallets, etc. Although there is a limit to the number of projects that can display bubblemaps, I find that for many projects I need, Tokensniffer still supports them relatively well. Note that tools like tokensniffer currently only best support two systems: Ethereum and BNB Chain.
So how to read bubblemap for standard insights? I will give detailed instructions below:
Bubblemap annotation (e.g. bubble map of $POND token):
The dots represent user wallets, the lines connecting the dots represent transactions between wallets.
The blue dots are normal wallets (it is also possible that the project wallet disguises itself as a regular wallet for a certain purpose ':V)
The orange dot is the project owner's wallet, the red dots are the dead wallet address (also known as burn wallet) used to burn tokens.
How to interact with the bubblemap is quite simple, just hover over the wallet dots to see wallet address information and token allocation percentage. When clicking on these wallet dots, we will be redirected to the blockscan channel (depending on the system such as Ethereum's etherscan, BNB Chain's bscscan, etc.) with detailed wallet information.
So let's analyze two opposing cases: One is the case where the token is safe to invest; The remaining case is tokens with unusual symptoms that are not eligible for investment.
+) Case 1: Token is safe
Let's immediately take the example of the $POND coin in picture 7, guys.
The orange dot as known is the wallet of the project owner, allocated <1% of the token amount and the dot size corresponds to the majority of other normal personal wallets —> Most commonly, most blue dots (and the orange dot) must be of similar size to avoid a rug pull if the project owner's wallet has an unusually large allocation of tokens —> There are no signs of abnormality in the $POND owner's wallet .
We see that the bubblemap displays 4 blue dots with many lines connecting them with surrounding blue wallets representing transactions. Usually wallets are located in the center of many transactions with individual wallets surrounded by exchange wallets. For example, clicking on the wallet dot whose first address is 0x28C6, we are redirected to bscscan with wallet information showing details of this wallet —> detecting the Tag name of the wallet is “Binance” —> This is the wallet address belongs to Binance; Blue wallet dots are often surrounded by lines connecting to 0x28C6 indicating that these wallets trade with the Binance exchange —> There are no unusual signs.
What about the 3 blue wallet dots that have no transactions with other wallets in the bubblemap, but are unusually large: 0x5a52 with 4.9% allocation, 0xf3d2 with 7.9% allocation, and 0xf977 with 9.9% allocation How? When checking wallet 0xf977 on bscscan, we immediately notice that the tag name is another wallet of Binance; Wallet 0xf3d2 has been dormant for 534 days from the time of writing —> this could be a team wallet to hold liquid tokens or a wallet of some VC investing long-term in Marlin from the fundraising stage ($POND There is no clear tokenomics so I cannot cross-check the information so this is just a guess); Meanwhile, wallet 0x5a52 stores a variety of coins with a total value of up to ~ $2 billion, of which typically up to ~ $1 billion is $BUSD, along with financial transfer transactions. one-way output, mainly to smart contract addresses -> Highly likely this is another wallet of Binance -> There are no unusual signs in these wallets.
In some cases, some projects will choose to use regular wallets instead of multi-sig wallets or smart contracts for allocation to treasury, presales, etc. And therefore, those wallets will appear in the bubblemap chart with unusually large sizes like the 3 wallet dots I analyzed above. Please cross-reference the information between the tokenomics distribution with those green dots to see if the allocation percentage matches to draw a confirmation. For example, in tokenomics the allocation for treasury is 6% -> when compared with the green dot, if the ratio matches is ~6% -> this green dot is the project's treasury allocation wallet -> not unusual.
From all the above data we see that $POND has no unusual signs in the token allocation shown on its bubblemap, so this is a safe project to invest in.
+) Case 2: Token shows unusual signs
I took the Token $ANM (Animverse) to analyze in this example.
Have you seen anything unusual? The orange dot shows that the project owner's wallet (team wallet) is unusually large, accounting for up to 87.8% of the allocation. That is, the project team holds almost the entire amount of tokens in the total supply and they like to dump it on investors at any time -> The risk level is in the red warning zone -> The possibility of the project being a scam is up to 99.9% (and that's actually it!)
Let's cross-reference with the tokenomics published by the team in the whitepaper, it is announced that the team only holds 16.4% of the allocation -> far different from the allocation shown on the bubblemap. Should I try adding together the allocation of team + advisors + ecosystem + play2earn + staking + liquid = 88.4%? This number is approximately 87.8% —> That means the team uses one wallet to hold all the tokens of the allocated objects? This explanation doesn't make any sense, even in my opinion, if the team actually used this reason to justify it, it would be too deceitful!
In short, you just need to pay attention if you detect any unusual signs, be careful because the rate of that project being a scam is very high.
So I have given you quite detailed instructions on how to use tokensniffer with the bubblemap feature to check the project's smart contract. In addition to tokensniffer's bubblemap, you can use the Bubblemaps .io tool to support. Note that Bubblemaps .io is quite limited compared to tokensniffer in terms of the number of supported projects, and to unlock all the features of Bubblemaps .io, you need a fairly high fee of ~$750. I read a pretty good article on how to use the bubblemap of The DataFi Vietnam stamp. You can read more.
1.3) Dashboard.tenderly.co
Tenderly is often used by me to check the code lines of smart contracts. When checking the code, please review the English keywords I mentioned in article part 2.
How to use is quite simple, you also copy the smart contract on coinecko and paste it into the search bar on Tendermint's homepage, then select "source code" and start the process of looking at the code. Please be patient!) Just like the illustration in Figure 9 below.
Of course, scanning the code can also use blockscan, but Tendermint synthesizes all the chains to help you not have to worry about which system's blockscan to use (bscscan, etherscan, polygonscan or solana scan...).
For example, let's look at the code of the $SHIB token.
** Tips: You can use ctrl+f on PC to find the English keywords I provided in part 2. If there are fewer keywords in the code that are beneficial to the team, it will be more creditable. *
2. Check Liquidity & Transactions
In the article part 2, I mentioned the liquidity criteria & unusual transactions of the project, so today I will introduce to you some tools I use to check liquidity & monitor transactions. Translation of a token:
2.1) Dex.guru
With Dex Guru we can take advantage of many things, I often use Dex Guru to check liquidity; track real-time transactions; track whales/shark to find alpha; see top holders, etc. Dex Guru's UI/UX interface is very user-friendly and categorizes information scientifically. In addition, you can swap tokens on this exchange, because they don't have tokens yet and maybe one fine day they will release tokens and airdrop to users soon, then you will have another chance for yourself.
I took the example of $PEOPLE to check liquidity with Dex Guru.
Okay, so how to use Dex Guru to check $PEOPLE's liquidity? Please follow these steps:
Copy the contract address of the $PEOPLE token on coinecko (or coinmarketcap/dropstab) and then paste it into the search bar in the Dex Guru interface. This copy step ensures you choose the correct verified token, avoiding confusion.
An information panel about the $PEOPLE token appears. On the left is a graph of $PEOPLE's liquidity along with trading pool activity; On the right side is information about transaction volume along with a classification of shark/whale/bot wallet addresses and their transactions (represented by logo).
Our work here is quite simple. Just look at it and you will see that $PEOPLE's total liquidity and trading volume are very modest, right? Compared to other meme coin tokens like $SHIB (total liquidity ~ $13 billion/ trading volume ~ $3 million), $PEOPLE is really too small —> cannot be bought in large volumes, it will cause strong fluctuations on price and the possibility of price slippage is very high.
In addition, you can see that each chart has a "zoom in" icon. Use that function to look deeper into each indicator. Usually I will check the transactions of the wallets to see if there is anything unusual like here. Dex Guru has a filter so you can easily choose to follow by wallet category (shark/whale/bot...) or filter according to trading order volume, etc.
In this article, I only guide you to check liquidity & view transactions using Dex Guru, so I will not go into detail about each feature. You can explore more on your own, or schedule an article where I will give more in-depth instructions about other features.
2.2) Dexscreener.com
There have been many authors introducing Dex Screener in the group, I hope you guys have read it too. Basically, the way to use Dex Screener to check liquidity is similar to Dex Guru, you can choose one of the two to use.
I often use Dex Screener to look at charts of many tokens at the same time. Dex Screener's price updates are very fast and accurate with low latency.
For example, I am using Dex Screener to look at multiple charts of tokens/coins: BTC/ETH; ETH/USDC; CHZ/USDT; UNI/ETH.
Ok, in this part 3 article, I have compiled and shown you how to use some of the tools I often use associated with the research topics according to the article frame in part 2. Of course, there are many other good tools. I can't summarize it all in this article. I have collected a channel of great free tools that are very easy to manage. Please look forward to it!
