How to DYOR (Do Your Own Research): A Comprehensive Guide

The vast and virtually unregulated crypto world poses significant risks to uninformed investors but also gives great opportunities to those who arm themselves with the right research.

What does DYOR mean?

The acronym DYOR (Do Your Own Research) is well-known in crypto and blockchain circles. It refers to carrying out your due diligence and gathering the right kind of market intelligence to make successful investment decisions. In this article, we will cover some key DYOR tools and how you can use each of these tools for effective crypto research.

DYOR Tool 1: CoinMarketCap.com

CoinMarketCap is the world’s leading platform for crypto market intelligence and research. It has a vast amount of market information on nearly all the coins and tokens in existence. The amount of information is so diverse and large that many new aspiring investors may feel lost figuring out what to pay attention to.

The key information you can focus on for your initial research is coin and token rankings in terms of market capitalization or 24-hour trading volume. In the later stages of DYOR, you may look at information regarding specific tokens of interest to you. For each token or coin, CoinMarketCap provides convenient information on one screen about the market cap, fully diluted market cap, trading volume, circulating supply, and the maximum supply allowed for the coin/token. These are the key bits of intelligence to evaluate a coin or token.

In addition to the above indicators, it is useful to study the price charts of coins/tokens to see how volatile they have been over a certain period of time. CoinMarketCap provides great interactive charts to zoom in to various time periods and study the coin’s price movements in more detail.

The front page of CoinMarketCap lists the top cryptocurrencies by market capitalization (Source: coinmarketcap.com) 

DYOR Tool 2: DefiPulse.com

Many crypto and blockchain projects are decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. For these projects, in addition to studying the token’s market cap, circulating supply, and other key indicators, it is useful to look at the project’s TVL (Total Value Locked) statistics.

TVL refers to the total amount locked in the smart contracts of the platform, normally in the form of debt collateral or liquidity pool funds. It is a vital measure of a DeFi project’s performance.

DeFi Pulse is a crypto research and news website which specifically tracks TVL stats for the largest DeFi projects. While the website is a good source for general information about crypto and blockchain, its killer feature is the up-to-date TVL stats.

DYOR Tool 3: CoinMarketCal.com

CoinMarketCal is an online calendar of upcoming events at blockchain projects. Given the vast number of tokens and coins in existence, tracking their future important events and developments is not an easy task. CoinMarketCal is a great resource that makes this task much more manageable.

The events covered by CoinMarketCal include coin/token listings, “burning” and other supply-related events, forking, governance voting, Telegram channel AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions, and many more.

While sources such as CoinMarketCap or DeFi Pulse can help you with historical insight, CoinMarketCal is a great future-oriented research tool.

DYOR Tool 4: CoinGecko.com

CoinGecko.com is another market research source for crypto projects. Similar to CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko provides information on market caps, prices, and trading volumes of a very large number of coins and tokens.

The website is also a good source of crypto intelligence in the form of podcasts, a newsletter, and industry commentary.

CoinGecko cannot compete with CoinMarketCap in terms of the sheer volume and variety of market intelligence provided. However, the website can be a great tool to cross-check vital KPIs of coins/tokens listed on CoinMarketCap.

The decentralized nature of the crypto world means that even the leading websites may not have perfectly accurate figures at all times. Thus, CoinGecko is a useful tool to cross-reference the accuracy and precision of key indicators such as market caps, token prices, rankings, or trading volumes listed at CoinMarketCap.

CoinMarketCap is owned by a leading crypto exchange, while CoinGecko has no such affiliation. For some people, it is enough reason to trust CoinGecko data more than they trust CoinMarketCap’s figures. Naturally, it is largely a matter of personal opinion, and CoinMarketCap has rarely been inaccurate in the provision of market data.

DYOR Tool 5: r/CryptoCurrency on Reddit.com

Reddit is the world’s largest discussion forum, with a diverse web of sub-reddits dedicated to various topics. r/CryptoCurrency is Reddit’s primary crypto and blockchain discussion board.

It is a great source of news and discussions about anything related to crypto. For DYOR purposes, r/Cryptocurrency is a vital tool to get first-hand insights into various blockchain projects. Many projects, even small ones, are being actively discussed on the website.

Reddit’s primary value in your research is the ability to ask the opinions of people who have been directly involved in crypto projects or have had experience purchasing coins. Unlike websites that give you statistics on market caps, prices, and other metrics, Reddit offers a unique way to directly converse with users about blockchain projects.

Opening a topic on even some of the most obscure tokens can yield a lot of responses and opinions based on first-hand experience. Naturally, you should take into account that all and any information sourced from Reddit is based strictly on subjective personal opinions. r/Cryptocurrency is a good qualitative, not a hard-data-based quantitative research tool.

While sourcing opinions on Reddit, be aware of the phenomenon of “shilling.” Shilling refers to users making untruthful, often promotional in nature posts in an effort to persuade others of their project’s worthiness.

DYOR Tool 6: Investopedia.com

Investopedia.com is a leading financial sector online resource. It acts as a repository of knowledge, definitions, and news for all varieties of finance — traditional stocks, derivatives, forex, and cryptocurrencies.

Many complex concepts from the world of crypto and blockchain are explained in easy-to-digest layman terms on the website. Investopedia is a valuable resource for early-stage crypto research to understand basic definitions and terms.

DYOR Tool 7: TradingView.com

TradingView is a social media platform for investors and aspiring investors to share their knowledge, opinions, and analysis on topics related to traditional finance as well as crypto investing. One of the key features of the platform is the great charts that community members contribute to the website.

This resource is great for accessing customized analysis carried out by the platform’s users into various crypto assets. Many users contribute excellent technical analysis on cryptocurrencies and tokens.

DYOR Tool 8: Google Trends

Google Trends is a useful free research tool in the suite of Google’s analytical tools. It shows the popularity index and trend over time for any word or phrase searched for on the website. You can use token and coin names or symbols to see their popularity and trend.

It is a great tool to track public interest in various tokens or cryptocurrencies. Google Trends allows you to narrow down your search results to particular countries and periods of time. You can also compare two or more search terms on the same chart.

Google Trends data for Dogecoin vs Bitcoin between September 2020 and September 2021 (source: Google Trends)

A limitation of Google Trends is that less popular smaller tokens may not have enough search volumes to produce reliable results. It is a tool most suited to researching the trends for more widely-known tokens.

DYOR Tool 9: Projects’ Websites and Social Media Pages

No DYOR exercise would be complete without careful study of a blockchain projects’ own website and social media pages. It’s important to research the project’s website to find out key information such as:

• People behind the project, which includes the founders and, also, possibly, the development team. Some projects provide a lot of details about the people involved, while others have a dearth of information. The lack of information may be a useful piece of intelligence on its own — projects with less transparency on the team involved may require further scrutiny.
• Detailed process of how the platform or application works, including its tokenomics. This is often detailed in the project’s white paper.
• Any venture capital attracted by the project.
• Details on what ownership, voting, and yield-earning rights token holders get. Again, this is often described in the project’s white paper. However, some of this information may not be clearly covered in the paper but still be available elsewhere on the website, or even on social media pages owned by the project.
• Wallets and exchanges that support the project’s token.

While the website, and particularly the white paper, may be great sources of fundamental information about the token, social media pages, especially Twitter accounts, are great sources of news on the latest developments related to the token.

Conclusion

The tools covered above are the key to solid research and due diligence. Each of them serves a somewhat different purpose, but used together, they will help you carry out effective DYOR.

The table below summarizes the core tools for DYOR and their intended purpose.