Blockchain Investments 101: How To Select a Blockchain?

Hey, fam!

I'm a data engineer and part-time blockchain enthusiast. In the past year, I've been more and more involved in blockchain analysis, trying to find better investment opportunities using my data skills.

I've been connecting to blockchain nodes and collecting various types of data to calculate network metrics and get an unbiased view of the blockchain state and adoption level (you know, blockchain project websites often love to inflate their own metrics).

Personally, when I assess the quality of a particular blockchain I look into 4 types of metrics:

1. Technicals. Support for EVM/WASM standards. Size of transaction fees (average and peak), throughput measured by TPS and block size, level of decentralization measured by number of active nodes and node requirements.

2. Community. Size of Twitter/Discord/Reddit communities of the network together with all projects building on it, quality of posts in these communities, average engagement level. Another important thing is developer activity, which can be measured by Git (e.g. number of commits and pull requests in project-related repos)

3. Liquidity. Liquidity available on-chain measured by TVL, the market cap of stablecoins, the number and quality of DeFi protocols building on chain, size of liquidity in DeFi apps. Also, another aspect is native token liquidity health (ratio between trading volume and total coin market cap). Better liquidity health means that you can sell more tokens without influencing the price.

4. Infrastructure. The available infrastructure needed for dApp projects to build on the chain and for average users to easily interact with the network. This can be measured by the number and quality of wallets, block explorers, node providers, custodians, etc.

I'm curious how other people make a decision about which network to invest. And what are the most interesting metrics, which may be indicators of the rising star?

Also, which category do you think is the most important for blockchain success?

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