How to identify garbage cryptocurrency projects and improve the quality of investment decisions?

1. Transparency: An Invisible Threshold

In recent cycles, the valuation system of the crypto industry has heavily relied on narrative ability. A clear and imaginative narrative is often enough to support early financing and market attention, as well as the potential for FDV growth after TGE.

DeFi, NFT, GameFi, AI + Crypto, Restaking, RWA… Each track, in its initial explosion, is accompanied by a large amount of concept output and vision promises. However, the facts have repeatedly proven that narratives alone cannot support long-term value; only product progress and real market adoption can achieve that.

As overall investment returns decline and failed projects emerge one after another, this valuation system has almost been falsified. In this context, investors' focus will shift from the narrative itself to the product strength, execution ability, and innovation capacity of the project itself, which has almost become a common consensus in the market.

However, there has always been an invisible threshold of "transparency" between key project information and investors, lacking a reliable information presentation platform. Only when project parties are willing to actively disclose dynamic information and allow users to conveniently query can the overall information efficiency and health of the crypto market be improved. Transparency is becoming one of the key factors affecting the industry's development pattern and future space.

2. Responding to Market Demand by Quantifying Transparency Metrics

Transparency has long been a vague, subjective, and difficult-to-compare concept, where users can only judge based on experience and feelings, making it hard to be assessed by the market through quantitative metrics. Therefore, RootData has officially launched a project information transparency score based on its long-term accumulation of fundamental project information, providing exposure in many prominent locations such as the homepage and project detail pages, allowing investors and users to understand and evaluate projects from more dimensions.

It should be clarified that RootData's transparency score is not a traditional project rating. It does not attempt to answer the highly subjective question of "Is the project worth investing in?" but focuses on a more fundamental and verifiable level: whether the project continuously and systematically discloses its key information to the market.

In design, the transparency score emphasizes objectivity and dynamism. It is not generated once but continuously changes with the supplementation, updating, or stagnation of project data. This means that transparency is not a metric that can be "completed" through a one-time concentrated disclosure, but rather a state that requires long-term maintenance.

Specifically, the transparency score integrates multiple dimensions of data integrity and update frequency, covering project basic information, team background, financing background and amounts, token distribution and unlocking situations, as well as project progress dynamics. Each dimension corresponds to whether the project has provided sufficient information to the market on key issues, rather than whether it has given "good-looking" answers.

The core of this design philosophy lies in separating transparency from value judgment, making it an objective record of external behavior.

3. Powerful Accelerator and Stepping Stone

In practical application, the value of the transparency score does not lie in short-term price predictions but more in the accumulation of long-term trust. For ordinary users, it provides a quick filtering mechanism to reduce exposure risks in projects with severely insufficient information or chronic failures, guiding more attention to projects that are more transparent and have greater development potential, in conjunction with RootData's existing heat index and growth index.

For project parties, the transparency score represents an externally accumulative reputation and evaluation system. Continuously updating project progress and truthfully disclosing adjustments and delays may not immediately bring market heat, but will significantly enhance the project's credibility at key nodes such as financing, cooperation, listing, marketing, or public opinion fluctuations, as well as in users' exploration and understanding.

More specifically, the transparency score can be understood from the following four perspectives:

1. Financing Accelerator: While increasing effective exposure, it provides structured and verifiable due diligence materials for investors, shortening decision-making cycles.

2. Listing Enhancer: With comprehensive and verifiable data, it meets the core requirements of exchanges for project information to be "public, searchable, and continuous," thus accelerating the listing review process.

3. Cooperation Stepping Stone: Using a professional and credible project display page as a business card, it provides transparent and structured information to potential partners (such as wallets, Launchpads, ecological funds, or other project parties), establishing initial trust and facilitating business cooperation communication.

4. Marketing Booster: Through high-traffic exposure and endorsement from the platform, it attracts more community users and KOLs, providing reliable third-party verification materials for social media dissemination and influencer marketing, amplifying overall promotional effects.

In other words, maintaining a high transparency score is a high ROI strategic behavior. Project parties often only need to make simple data supplements to effectively improve their scores. For example, among projects with similar concepts in the same track, those with higher transparency scores tend to receive faster responses and deeper negotiation opportunities when connecting with exchanges and leading VCs due to lower trust and communication costs.

Conversely, a low transparency score due to slow or stagnant long-term information updates means that the project's weight in the entire industry recognition network continues to decline, systematically losing market visibility, and this process is often slow but irreversible. In contrast, projects that can continuously disclose real progress, even at a slow pace, are more likely to re-enter the market's view and gain users' trust in subsequent stages.

In fact, RootData's project data has already become one of the reference sources for due diligence in listing on exchanges such as Binance, and its data API has been adopted by hundreds of well-known industry clients, including Binance and OKX. This means that the influence of the information completeness and update frequency of projects on RootData is not only presented through the platform itself but is also amplified through its extensive partner network, directly correlating with its market promotion effects, making data transparency play an increasingly important role in the industry.

To align with this trend, RootData has officially launched a project claiming function. Verified project party accounts can specifically maintain project data, significantly lowering the threshold and cycle for project parties to maintain their transparency. Meanwhile, any ordinary user can also provide feedback on information errors or untimely updates on project pages through the feedback button and receive reward points.

4. Transparency is No Longer Just an Add-On

As the crypto industry gradually enters a phase centered on products and users, the importance of transparency is being re-recognized. It is no longer an add-on but one of the fundamental conditions that determine whether a project has long-term participation qualifications.

It can be expected that more and more investors and research institutions will regard project information disclosure and transparency as a fundamental metric in their internal evaluations. Meanwhile, exchanges, market makers, and third-party partners are increasingly relying on structured data rather than scattered information during the screening process. The logic is not complex: if a project cannot continuously explain its most basic development status to the outside, external participants are unlikely to have confidence in its long-term governance capabilities. Here, transparency is not a moral evaluation but a risk management tool.

In summary, the project transparency score launched by RootData is not intended to predict the future but to provide the market and users with an objective and clear scale for measuring the current information status. In a market lacking unified disclosure standards and with high information barriers, this scale itself is becoming a scarce resource and playing an immeasurable role in the re-evaluation of the industry's value system.

The higher the market transparency, the more friendly it is to protecting the interests of ordinary users and investors, which in turn eliminates "junk" projects from the market and rewards those that respect users and the spirit of Web3, promoting the healthy development of the industry.

In this context, every crypto project should take immediate action to incorporate transparency enhancement into substantive operational strategies, focus on its image within user groups, and seize the initiative in the competition of new dimensions and new metrics to win the preferences of exchanges, VCs, and users alike.