I'm now looking at whether the project is reliable or not, but I don't first check how beautifully the roadmap is written. I start by reviewing the treasury expenditures: where did the money go, is it unlocked in segments according to milestones, or was a lump sum paid to "certain consultants/ecosystem partners" with no follow-up. Honestly, as long as the money is spent transparently, and each expenditure is followed by verifiable deliverables (code, audits, mainnet data, governance records), I feel more at ease even if progress is slow.

Recently, modularization and the narrative around the DA layer have become popular again, and developers are quite excited. Ordinary users (including myself) are completely confused... In such times, I worry even more that project teams might exploit the hype around concepts to package budgets as "narrative progress." My own simple method: see if they are willing to write milestones at a verifiable level, whether they review treasury spending after each disbursement, and if they dare to admit failures. I’d rather miss out than get hacked or rug-pulled—those experiences are too painful.