When people do research about crypto projects, most limit themselves to just look at the price, the website and maybe the whitepaper. However, since the blockchain is entirely public and readable for everyone, there is so much more data that can help you with your investment decision. The following article will go over my 3 most used ones.

This is probably the most well-known free website when it comes to the world of Decentralised Finance. DeFi Llama is the go-to site when it comes to getting a quick overview of the historical performance of any DeFi protocol.

The primary metric DeFi Llama is tracking is the TVL (Total Value Locked) of DeFi projects and their historical change. TVL just means how much money is locked in a protocol and can be equated to the broader market's interest in that project. Usually, rapidly growing TVL indicates that more people are interested in and using a particular project.

But DeFi Llama also has a lot more cool features, such as:

• A list of potential airdrops, so protocols that do not have a token yet. This doesn’t guarantee that interacting with these projects will qualify you for a future airdrop, but since you can filter by TVL, you are able to efficiently farm the biggest potential airdrop first before going for smaller, less valuable ones.

• A table of the top protocols, ordered by chains. This can be super useful to people who are exploring a new ecosystem and looking for the most used and trusted protocols. It’s also interesting to see which chains do not have a certain type of DeFi app and try to figure out why that is or if someone is already building it.

• A list of stablecoins and information about their historical dominance in the markets. Especially after the UST crash, people have been warier of stablecoins outside of the top 4 (USDC, USDT, BUSD & DAI). This tab does make it easier to find other smaller cap stables that usually offer better APRs to farm, albeit at a higher risk of depeg and loss.

The most powerful yet overlooked free tool in the world of DeFi. Dune allows anyone to create their own lists, tables and charts using plain SQL. Not only that, but Dune then also allows you to share your analytics for the world to see and the best part is they are updated in real-time since it gets all of its data directly from the blockchain.

Even if you have no experience in coding or querying SQL, you can just explore the thousands of dashboards that the crypto community has created. If you want to know more about your favourite DeFi protocol, chances are someone created a dashboard for it, enabling you to get extra insights. Here are some of my favourites:

• I always track this Curve Finance dashboard as I am a huge fan of the project, allowing me to gain a more fundamental view of the exchange. It is especially useful to see how the protocol is valued with traditional metrics (like P/E ratio) and compare them to their traditional counterparts.

• If you’re into NFTs, you need to look at this Market Overview. It shows you a bunch of detailed information about the top NFT projects and how the whole market is evolving (hint: it’s not great). It also gives you insights into which NFT marketplaces are the most popular, so you know where you should list that JPEG of yours.

• Lastly, I like to look at the total DEX Metrics to gauge how DeFi is doing as a whole. It’s easy to lose yourself in analysing the performance of a single protocol and forget to look at the broader DeFi ecosystem. Whenever a project gains in TVL, you should be asking yourself whether or not they are attracting new capital or stealing it from competitors. This dashboard can help you answer this question.

This platform is one of the best for gaining a quick overview of any blockchain, NFT project or DeFi protocol. Token Terminal provides a comprehensive overview of the on-chain data for over 140 different projects, delivering on their motto “fundamentals for crypto“.

These metrics are extremely important when you’re considering buying a token of a certain protocol because they indicate how well they are doing. You can almost imagine this as getting direct, real-time insights into the purchasing behaviour of a business and its segments. Here are the most important metrics to look at:

• Revenue Share: This shows you when and how much revenue the protocol has generated. This is extremely important to look at since this is the single most important metric that creates value for the token since it often represents future potential cashflows to the holders.

• Composition: This gives you information about which parts of projects are the most popular as well as if there is any significant concentration risk associated with it. For example, there were multiple projects that had extremely high exposure to LUNA, meaning that after the crash, there wasn’t much else to prop up the value of their tokens.

• Competitive Landscape: This chart allows you to compare different metrics to other similar protocols. This can help you identify whether or not a project is undervalued relative to its peers.

Thank you so much for reading this article; I hope it helped you on your crypto journey. If you want more content like like, consider supporting me in these various ways:

• Follow me on Twitter to see my day-to-day thoughts and analysis

• Subscribe to this blog to get a notification every time I release a new article. You can do so via the button in the upper-right corner.

• Mint this article as an NFT and showcase your support to all your friends.

• Share this article with one of your friends who wants to get into crypto :)

When people do research about crypto projects, most limit themselves to just look at the price, the website and maybe the whitepaper. However, since the blockchain is entirely public and readable for everyone, there is so much more data that can help you with your investment decision. The following article will go over my 3 most used ones.

This is probably the most well-known free website when it comes to the world of Decentralised Finance. DeFi Llama is the go-to site when it comes to getting a quick overview of the historical performance of any DeFi protocol.

The primary metric DeFi Llama is tracking is the TVL (Total Value Locked) of DeFi projects and their historical change. TVL just means how much money is locked in a protocol and can be equated to the broader market's interest in that project. Usually, rapidly growing TVL indicates that more people are interested in and using a particular project.

But DeFi Llama also has a lot more cool features, such as:

• A list of potential airdrops, so protocols that do not have a token yet. This doesn’t guarantee that interacting with these projects will qualify you for a future airdrop, but since you can filter by TVL, you are able to efficiently farm the biggest potential airdrop first before going for smaller, less valuable ones.

• A table of the top protocols, ordered by chains. This can be super useful to people who are exploring a new ecosystem and looking for the most used and trusted protocols. It’s also interesting to see which chains do not have a certain type of DeFi app and try to figure out why that is or if someone is already building it.

• A list of stablecoins and information about their historical dominance in the markets. Especially after the UST crash, people have been warier of stablecoins outside of the top 4 (USDC, USDT, BUSD & DAI). This tab does make it easier to find other smaller cap stables that usually offer better APRs to farm, albeit at a higher risk of depeg and loss.

The most powerful yet overlooked free tool in the world of DeFi. Dune allows anyone to create their own lists, tables and charts using plain SQL. Not only that, but Dune then also allows you to share your analytics for the world to see and the best part is they are updated in real-time since it gets all of its data directly from the blockchain.

Even if you have no experience in coding or querying SQL, you can just explore the thousands of dashboards that the crypto community has created. If you want to know more about your favourite DeFi protocol, chances are someone created a dashboard for it, enabling you to get extra insights. Here are some of my favourites:

• I always track this Curve Finance dashboard as I am a huge fan of the project, allowing me to gain a more fundamental view of the exchange. It is especially useful to see how the protocol is valued with traditional metrics (like P/E ratio) and compare them to their traditional counterparts.

• If you’re into NFTs, you need to look at this Market Overview. It shows you a bunch of detailed information about the top NFT projects and how the whole market is evolving (hint: it’s not great). It also gives you insights into which NFT marketplaces are the most popular, so you know where you should list that JPEG of yours.

• Lastly, I like to look at the total DEX Metrics to gauge how DeFi is doing as a whole. It’s easy to lose yourself in analysing the performance of a single protocol and forget to look at the broader DeFi ecosystem. Whenever a project gains in TVL, you should be asking yourself whether or not they are attracting new capital or stealing it from competitors. This dashboard can help you answer this question.

This platform is one of the best for gaining a quick overview of any blockchain, NFT project or DeFi protocol. Token Terminal provides a comprehensive overview of the on-chain data for over 140 different projects, delivering on their motto “fundamentals for crypto“.

These metrics are extremely important when you’re considering buying a token of a certain protocol because they indicate how well they are doing. You can almost imagine this as getting direct, real-time insights into the purchasing behaviour of a business and its segments. Here are the most important metrics to look at:

• Revenue Share: This shows you when and how much revenue the protocol has generated. This is extremely important to look at since this is the single most important metric that creates value for the token since it often represents future potential cashflows to the holders.

• Composition: This gives you information about which parts of projects are the most popular as well as if there is any significant concentration risk associated with it. For example, there were multiple projects that had extremely high exposure to LUNA, meaning that after the crash, there wasn’t much else to prop up the value of their tokens.

• Competitive Landscape: This chart allows you to compare different metrics to other similar protocols. This can help you identify whether or not a project is undervalued relative to its peers.

Thank you so much for reading this article; I hope it helped you on your crypto journey. If you want more content like like, consider supporting me in these various ways:

• Follow me on Twitter to see my day-to-day thoughts and analysis

• Subscribe to this blog to get a notification every time I release a new article. You can do so via the button in the upper-right corner.

• Mint this article as an NFT and showcase your support to all your friends.

• Share this article with one of your friends who wants to get into crypto :)