You may often hear the phrase “Do your own research,” or #DYOR, when cryptocurrency is being discussed. It is often said by an influencer on social media after they promote a cryptocurrency to limit their legal liability if things go wrong.

That’s all well and good, you might say, but how do you actually do that?

The field of cryptocurrency is moving so quickly, it is hard to keep up with general trends let alone all the brand new projects, even for an experienced veteran who is in crypto full-time.

And as a beginner, you may find yourself feeling like you are lost in a sea of confusion.

That’s why I wrote this blog to help you.

In this blog, I tend to focus on “fundamental analysis” which refers to the analysis of the overall health and success of an investment taking into account its competitors, the market it is in, and the success or effectiveness of related organizations, products and ecosystem.

This would be contrasted from “technical analysis” which looks at past trends of its price action to determine patterns and likely future price action.

This may not be a totally complete list of what’s out there, but here are four really great tools:

CoinMarketCap / CoinGecko

Screenshot of Coingecko.com

CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko are the two most popular cryptocurrency price aggregators out there. They have in-depth price, history, markets and other data on over 15,000 and 11,000 cryptocurrencies respectively.

They continually expand on their services, and both have newsletters, blogs, glossaries and in-depth facts and figures on each cryptocurrency as well as different sectors of the cryptocurrency market, such as DeFi, NFTs, etc.

They also show detailed data on the activity of cryptocurrency exchanges as well as individual cryptocurrencies. And they usually have links to a cryptocurrency’s main website and social media sites.

LunarCrush

Bitcoin social media metrics on lunarcrush.com

LunarCrush tracks in-depth data on the social media activity of cryptocurrencies.

A great way to dig into more details about the community and which projects are hot, LunarCrush also gamifies the user experience by awarding users with their own cryptocurrency, $LUNR, and awarded levels with more benefits based on how much the user has interacted with the site. They also have data on crypto exchanges, markets, and even a rating for how “influential” crypto influencers are. You can even check out the metrics on yours truly here.

You can sign up for LunarCrush here.

DappRadar

dappradar.com home page

DappRadar is a great place to look under the hood and see how many actual users are transacting on or using decentralized applications (or dApps) that are built on different blockchains.

You are able see price action and what people are talking about above, only on DappRadar can you see how many users are active daily, weekly and monthly on blockchain video games such as Axie Infinity or Alien Worlds.

Same goes for active users and sales on NFT marketplaces such as OpenSea, Foundation or Solanart.

DappRadar also shows which blockchain these dApps are built on. DappRadar is now also offering the chance to win token airdrops.

Social Media Accounts

As one digs deeper, one can also look to see the main three social media sites that cryptocurrencies use the most for their communities. This are Twitter, Telegram and Discord. Needless to say, it is a red flag if they don’t. This is useful in weeding out scams. At the same time, just because a project has social media accounts, is not a guarantee they aren’t a scammer either.

You can also look into these to see if they are active on Twitter, and if the Telegram or Discord have updates from the team and if the community is active, or not. Are updates coming from the team, or is it mostly spam? Is the team responsive if you have questions or issues?

As a note of caution, it is good practice to look for pro’s and con’s when looking into a cryptocurrency project. Be careful of individual influencers giving definite forward-looking statement such as “this coin is definitely going to 10X” or “this coin is definitely doing to $1”. It doesn’t mean it won’t happen, but the fact is that they don’t know that. No one knows the future exactly.

It is healthy to look at multiple sources of data and not limit your data to a single source.

Did you find these helpful? What other tools do you use to do your own research? Drop your comments below.

This content is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute trading advice. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do not invest more than you can afford to lose. The author of this article may hold assets mentioned in the piece.