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PolkaWorld published an article aboutDetermine whether the project is legalsecondary title
Soft indicators
Hard metrics are the first factors you should consider when evaluating a project, and should carry most of the weight in your decision. The reason is that they are very difficult to fake or manipulate, provided of course that you can verify the information you find. Therefore, we call them hard indicators.
But there are other factors to be aware of, they can also be used to judge the legitimacy of a project, but are more prone to manipulation, so these should not seriously affect your decision. These are called soft indicators.
1. Website Quality
The quality of a projects website can sometimes provide an indication of a projects legitimacy. A poorly structured site with typos and grammatical errors, or poor style, a template site that hasnt been seriously improved or changed, a site with little information about projects and no links to their GitHub or other resources, usually you A website that feels unprofessional is a sign that the team might not be serious about the project.
But that doesnt mean all well-designed websites are solid projects. After all, this is a soft indicator. Many projects without any substantive plans have great, even good-looking websites, and they spend their energy trying to mislead the community on how to improve the sites visuals. Therefore, an excellent website does not necessarily represent a legitimate project, and a very spammy website may also represent an illegal project. The quality of the website alone is usually not enough to draw a conclusion.
2. Social media
Having a vibrant community is a good sign of a legitimate project. The team that engages with the community provides updates, answers questions, holds AMAs, publishes articles, and is a team with a willingness to keep community members engaged and informed.
But at the same time, social media presence and engagement can easily be faked and manipulated. Its very easy to start a Telegram group or a Discord group and populate it with thousands of bots. Although bots need to be identified on Discord according to Discords terms, scammers dont care about those terms and conditions.
A team that tweets 5 times a day or publishes a Medium article every other day is not necessarily building something substantial.
So, verify the authenticity of their social media. Join their channel to ask questions and hear firsthand about whats going on with the community and moderators. If you see a lot of users posting very brief comments such as good project, To the moon, thank you, etc. that dont really catch on, be skeptical and watch carefully as these may be comments from bots . Also, verify any information the team shares on social media and check what others are saying. But also verify the reviews, whether they are positive or negative.
3. Media content
Verifying the authenticity of social media is media content. Mentions in third-party articles, YouTube videos, and general promotion of the project.
When it comes to articles, the first thing to check is whether the article is an actual report or a paid press release, especially if a project places this report prominently on the page. Or does the author have any vested interest in helping market the project. You can check the previous articles of these authors to see if they have been doing marketing services for this project.
The same thing applies to the average YouTuber and some YouTube influencers. Many of them do it for a living or as a way of scraping projects. Look for excellent authors and KOLs who provide as much objective information as possible, usually they output the results of their own research.
Thats not to say media exposure is a bad thing. It is probably the richest source of information outside of the project itself, but at the same time, it requires a lot of information to cross-check and validate.
4. Email communication
Today, many projects use Telegram, Discord or similar apps for community development and also as the only communication and support channels. However, if they have an email address for their domain name, this can be considered an additional measure of credibility in addition to providing another channel of communication.
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Crowdloans
With the recent launch of parachains on Kusama, many projects aiming to become parachains have launched crowdloans to collect the necessary funds to participate in the parachain Auction. But with the release of Kusama and Polkadot parachains, many scams may also surface. Therefore, crowdloan ensures your safe participation.
First, only projects aiming to be parachains should have crowloan. If a project is not a parachain candidate, there will be no crowloan associated with it.
The most reliable way to participate in parachain crowloan is through the crowloan module on Polkadot-JS applications. This module sends a special extrinsic message that locks your funds until the end of the parachain slot lease period and guarantees your stake will be returned after that.
Many parachain candidates also offer a way to participate through their websites. But you should make sure they use the crowloan module under the hood, and they just wrap it in a more user-friendly UI. If instead, their crowloan interface transfers the funds to an account, those funds will be fully under their control, which means you need to have full confidence that the team will indeed crowloan with the funds, and at the end of the lease period your The pledge is returned to you. Or if they dont win the slot, they protect them well. If they are doing something similar, it should be explicitly mentioned on their website and documentation.
Having said that, some teams have been doing token sales or exchanges to try and get a head start on raising funds for auctions, but this is not crowdloan and still requires total trust in the team. So, if you plan to participate in these token swaps, make sure the project is reputable and that you have the correct information through its official website and social media channels.
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other information
Verifying facts is a necessary skill not only for your own research, but also for filtering the vast amounts of information we encounter on the internet every day. If you are interested in learning more about how to verify facts and verify claims, please review the material below.
A very good YouTube series on fact-checking that covers a lot of ground can be found here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4aNmdL3Hr0list=PL8dPuuaLjXtN07XYqqWSKpPrtNDiCHTzU
For those who like to read, another great resource on fact-checking can be found here. https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/
Wikipedia article on fact verification
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last suggestion
Once youve read all this material and done your research and determined that a project is legit, the other thing you need to make sure is that you need to understand what the project is for and what new things it can bring to the ecosystem.
This falls outside the realm of fact checking and verifying claims, but this bears mentioning: fully understanding what something does and its expected impact is an integral part of making an informed decision, so dont ignore it.
Welcome to learn Substrate:
https://substrate.dev/
Follow Substrate progress:
https://github.com/paritytech/substrate
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https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot
