Hundreds of new projects are created every day with alluring earnings promises. Not all of them, though, will be able to live long enough to provide you profits. Tired of being scammed? Stick to the BSCDaily’s checklist to find your way out!
1. The Presale + public round sells more than 30% – 70%++ of the total supply.
One of the first things you, as a savvy investor, should consider is the number of tokens sold during the presale and private/public sales. With sales numbers ranging from 30% to 70% of total supply, these projects do not appear to be a reliable investment. It is common for projects based on memes or initiatives established for the aim of community fun to generate such high revenues in early rounds.
They will not sell out such a big number of tokens in well-planned and determined projects. Because a huge quantity of tokens entering the market can quickly produce large volatility, causing them to lose control over the price line. Furthermore, the minimal number of tokens held by the development team demonstrates a lack of dedication to the project.
To prevent underperforming investments, do not disregard the token distribution while assessing and evaluating a new project.
2. No or little information regarding adding liquidity.
The second characteristic of an untrustworthy project is that the address has low liquidity or does not possess any liquid addresses. If the token is introduced to the liquidity pool, the project will choose the token’s price and must deposit it into the liquidity account using its own funds. Trusted projects will possess a significant quantity, generally starting at $10,000, to guarantee that token sales are normal for consumers.
If liquidity is low between $1,000 and $5,000, the slippage will be quite significant. This quickly leads to a large price differential, leading naive investors to purchase tokens at exorbitant rates.
Furthermore, if the production crew owns a significant portion of the LP after the project has been running for a while, they can defraud the project by selling off their own LP. In this situation, the token’s price will see unusually significant swings and may reach $0.
The following is a demonstration of Panther Token’s Liquidity Pool.
3. Crazy ROI (APY, ARP)
The creation and expansion of the DeFi market provide more chances for investors to benefit. However, every chance is fraught with danger. The larger the possible reward, the greater the risk. Many DeFi projects have Farming or Staking features with amazing ROI to appeal to customers’ avarice and desire to make money quickly. Typically, your error while investing in a scam enterprise will teach you a valuable lesson and virtually all of the money put in the project will vanish. Hundreds of such projects continue to exist and draw significant investment on a daily basis.
Below are a few examples of fraudulent projects:
Dinopark token
Macho token
Were Wolf token:
And there are numerous projects that are being established every day that are ready to take the money you save for investment chances.
4. No or unclear plans to lock/burn the tokens, no smart contract audits
Be wary of projects with no or vague intentions to lock/burn tokens or with no smart contract audits. Furthermore, they will burn or lock tokens to demonstrate transparency and dedication to the project.
Consider whether or not the team’s contract has been properly examined when learning about a project to invest in. Most fraudulent projects will not pay for a third-party audit. However, a handful remains who pay for the audit in order to improve user confidence and attract participation. The following step is often a notification that an audit has been registered but no results are available. In other situations, they will commit fraud before the audit results are released or when the audit unit reports a flaw in their code or contract.
The best approach is to wait for the audit findings before participating.
Example of Rabbit Finance audit result:
5. No TimeLock Contract & vague Vesting schedule
A decent project will disseminate information regarding vesting the quantity of tokens in tokenomics, which is a good project. Faraland, for example, provides details of their tokenomics.
Changes to a time-limited contract are possible with a TimeLock Contract. This demonstrates that when a hacker or someone on the project’s team changes something on the contract, such as increasing the withdrawal charge to 100% (Scam), it must take a specific amount of time for the team to discover and take urgent preventative action.
6. Has a great number of Twitter and Telegram followers/members but few interactions
A good project or one with a good marketing team will be noticed by the community, which will lead to numerous debates and exchanges about how to utilize and ask questions about that project. There will, however, be projects with a huge number of users but little engagement. They can repurchase Twitter or Telegram accounts with a specific amount of followers and then modify their identities to instill trust among users. If the project is open and confident in its ability to succeed, it does not have to be; nevertheless, we all notice a problem when a project purposefully generates false beliefs for individuals.
7. Ambiguous Docs/Whitepaper
Always take the time to read the whitepaper or documentation associated with each project. A reliable project will offer the users a whole Whitepaper or Docs. The Alpaca Finance project is an excellent example: https://docs.alpacafinance.org/
Due to the scam teams’ continual creation of new projects, there is no time to develop a comprehensive or exhaustive whitepaper or documentation. If you come across a project with bad documentation or a sloppy whitepaper, please make a note of it and ban it.
I once read a docs of a project titled “A.finance” but in their docs, it reads “B.Finance”; maybe because they forgot to update when copying, and of course I won’t join in such projects straight away if there was an issue from the start.
8. Anonymous team
A team with public information and many years of expertise will undoubtedly provide users with more peace of mind when investing than an anonymous project development team.
Although it is not a need for determining whether or not a project is a fraud, a project with clear development team information is more likely to attract members. However, initiatives with anonymous teams should not be underestimated. Consider all aspects rather than simply the development team. To boost credibility, a scam enterprise may totally steal the names of renowned individuals throughout the world or even build phony accounts.
9. No competitive advantages over projects with similar concepts.
Although this element does not necessarily determine if a project is a scam or not, it is one of the secondary variables you should consider. Because every project is established with the aim to thrive, concepts that are copied must nevertheless have more original, improved features or user experiences. Having too many clones or forks from various projects typically leads to clone projects failing quickly.
For example, there are several DeFi fork projects from the https://www.goosedefi.com/ project, and 100% of these projects have vanished in a short period of time.
So, if you come across a project with an outdated concept, an old web interface, and an old source code, it’s better to avoid it.
10. Tokens with a total supply >10 Billion should be carefully evaluated.
I’ve never recognized it, but the project generates so many tokens, and everyone knows that the lowest unit of money that we cryptos have tacitly agreed upon is one satoshi, therefore these tokens are even valuable. In comparison to one satoshi, it is exceedingly tiny. Is this logical?
It doesn’t matter whether any project claims that having such a huge number of tokens is always enjoyable, but no one who wants to be nice and generates such a large number of tokens must have experienced it. SafeMoon, SafeBNB, and a slew of other initiatives have as many tokens as sand in the desert, and the outcomes are public knowledge.
Here is the total supply and chart belong to SAFEBNB as mentioned:
11. Apart from the presale, there are no further marketing campaigns.
Take the time to study instead of naively investing in businesses that just focus on advertising the presale and do not provide a clear path. They will just sell you tokens and then depart, leaving the project with a large sum of money.
A good project will not only communicate about the presale on Telegram or Twitter, but will also disclose the project’s development milestones, such as a collaboration, product development, or marketing plan, and so on.
12. No (or useless) use cases for the token
Always question the project’s token use cases. What is the purpose of this token in the project? What is its critical role?
When creating and selling this token, it is critical that the token has a direct impact on the project’s ecosystem. The token’s value will be directly proportional to the project’s existence. There have been several situations where tokens have nothing to do with the project and retaining them makes no sense. So, take the time to study the project’s field of operation as well as the token’s use cases.
