Oasis Network is growing, more and more people are getting attention to it every week. This brings a lot of new ideas and projects in the ecosystem but unfortunately, that also brings some scams, built by unscrupulous individuals.
It’s not an easy task to see if a project is a scam, especially in his beginning. But we’ll give you some basic checks (or tips) that you may perform before investing in any project.
We’ll divide it in three categories:
🔴 Red Flag: if one of this is true, you must be really careful and avoid the project.
🟠Orange Flag: if one of this is true that doesn’t mean that it’s a scam but added to some other flags it may make the difference.
🟢 Green Flag: those are good flags, more are true, better is it for the trust.
- 🔴 The team asks fundamental questions about the project to his community.
What do we mean by fundamental questions? For instance: a NFT project asking how much NFTs should they generate; a DeFi project asking with which coin they should pair their token i.e.
It’s normal to ask some basic questions to the community, more than that, it’s good. But some fundamental questions shouldn’t be pending during the development stage. Those questions should have been answered by the team itself way before. - 🔴 Twitter account and/or Discord server full of bots.
This is quite easy to spot. A recently created Twitter account for a under-development project with a couple of thousands of followers should ring the bell. Buying fake followers or Discord users allows to some projects to appear legit for a new joiner. - 🔴 The project’s website is either a copy or is really bad.
It’s okay to have a “meh” website, especially when it’s the beginning of the project. But still, the team have to deliver a minimum quality website. They are working on a web3 project, they should be able to deliver a respectable website. Check if it’s not a copy of an existing one, a free template with just a few phrases i.e. - 🔴 People being banned for asking questions or for a constructive remark.
You are allowed to (and you must) ask legit questions about a project, you’re planning to put your money in it so you have all the rights to do so. If the project’s team keeps banning people for asking those kind of questions or for giving a constructive remarks, you should stay away from it. - 🔴 The roadmap being completely ignored by the team.
We are not saying that everything should be precise hour by hour. But if you see that the team is not following the roadmap for awhile and without any explanation, it may be a red flag.
- 🟠Way too bad English, team members talking gibberish or nonsense.
Not all projects are made by native English-speakers (like OasisWatcher for instance) and we’ll not be bashing any project because they have some spellings errors here and there, it happens to anyone. But the person in charge of the communication have to make some efforts to appear professional. Most importantly, he have to make efforts to be understood by people. - 🟠In each official tweet are tagged a bunch of other accounts related to Oasis.
For instance when a project is announcing their new website with a tweet, they will tag a bunch of Oasis communities in it. Why so? It attracts the followers of those accounts and it’s a quick way to expand your reach. But it’s not organic and appears more like spam.
- 🟢 The team has been through a KYC process.
That means the team has proven his identity and was “doxxed”. Therefore, it’s no more a anonymous team and can be handled for responsible if the project try to scam. - 🟢 The project’s contracts were audited by a third-party entity.
A third-party auditors will analyses the smart contracts of the project and check if there is nothing odd in it that may lead to an eventual rug afterwards.
We hope those small tips will help you to avoid scam projects. We’ll continue to add new points here with the time. If you have some doubts about a project, or proofs that a project is trying to scam, report it to us in Twitter or by email so we can also warn the community about it.
Let’s keep Oasis ecosystem clean together!
