Modern 3rd gen crypto currencies are as much a technology ecosystem as a medium of financial exchange. While it used to be you couldn’t much miss when investing in crypto, since the creation of the Ethereum project, the associated EC20 protocol, and the proliferation of ICOs, and the wide amount of projects that are available I have devised a metric one can use to help them understand the project, its strengths and weaknesses and whether it is worth investment or not.

The first is how wide the applicable problem space is, how novel the solution, and how this answer improves on what is already there. The wider and more pervasive the problem space, the more apt the blockchain ecosystem is to succeed and the more valuable the individual token will be.

The second I go on is how does the mining process work, with the Ethereum Casper upgrade proof of work changes to proof of stake. So in essence you get interest on your Hodls on POS chains. Depending on other factors this can make a coin profitable or not.

The third is the partnerships and adopters of the technology, if a platform has organizations adopting its technology, there is a much greater chance of not only staying power but appreciation.

The fourth is the team behind the project itself, their bios and their resumes. I am looking for the synergy of their skill sets, how many awards or how much recognition they have and what their open source contributions were.

Crypto market caps, and other factors of the coin, tend to change over time, for actual numerical metrics I look at adoption rates, pulls from its repo, and general block chain usage. The metrics available will vary from coin to coin and even their availability indicates how mature the project is.

Evaluating technologies of any kind is more art than science, like programming languages, operating systems or new computing paradigms some have staying power most are a flash in the pan. Both can fit your needs depending on your strategy and in the case of crypto what the market conditions are.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a financial professional, this is for entertainment purposes only and to incite discussion it is into intended to be financial advice of any kind.