How to Choose Projects on TON: A Guide with DYOR Example

In our recent article about Financial Literacy in Web3, we explored how to do your own research about projects and evaluate them based on the most impactful metrics.

In this feature, we will continue our DYOR take by exploring platforms where you can find projects worth researching. Let’s dive in!

Quick DYOR Reminder

When you find an interesting project, follow this checklist:

1. Numbers: market cap, trading volume, user count, transaction volume, number of holders.
2. Team: founders, ambassadors or loyal key opinion leaders, investors, community activity in social media, discussion topics.
3. Tech: Whitepaper, roadmap, FAQ, documentation, GitHub, security audits.
4. Fundamentals: is there a market behind the idea, will anyone prefer it over Web2 analogs or Web3 competitors, potential user base, and their funds.
5. Website: unique visitors, their geography and activity, pages per visit counter.

We’ll return to it later when researching an example project we found.

Where to Look for the Projects on TON

We may suggest 3 credible sources: DYOR Ninja, CoinGecko and Ton.app.

DYOR Ninja for TON Projects Search

DYOR.io has a lot more projects as it is purely focused on the TON ecosystem. The data provided is more valuable than on CoinGecko: along with typical prices, it has community likes, holder count, liquidity depth chart, trading pairs lists, and deposit/withdrawal transactions chart. That’s more than enough to make up a mind.

The TON.app Jetton page also has dozens of tokens listed. BTW, TON-based tokens are called Jettons, but we still call them tokens out of habit. This website shows the same data as price, volumes, and market cap, plus user reviews for the projects they belong to.

CoinGecko for TON Projects Search

The first website that comes to mind is CoinGecko’s TON Ecosystem category. Here, you can find a few dozen coins with their price changes, trading volumes, and exchanges where they are trading, as well as websites, social media, smart contract addresses, and explorer links.

Now, let’s research a project

First, let’s try CoinGecko. Most TON tokens don’t have a market cap calculated, so we randomly choose one of those that have it — the Ton Ship token (SHIP).

The Numbers. According to CoinGecko’s data, It is standing tall with 39.6% percent growth in a week, 578% in a year, and a good-looking 24-hour volume of $546k. The circulation supply of 69 billion is roughly 2/3 of its max supply of 100 billion tokens.

Sadly, on DYOR Ninja there are some fake versions of SHIP, so be careful and check the contract address before looking at charts.

By searching the SHIP contract address on Tonviewer we found that there are more than 3,000 holders with a proper token distribution among them. The SHIP page on DeDust.io confirms there is enough liquidity to invest a few hundred with a moderate slippage — that’s good.

The Team. The SHIP team is anonymous. For a meme/gaming project like this, it is plausible. In the SHIP Telegram community, the users are constantly chatting and asking questions about drops and price predictions. Well, the community looks alive.

Among SHIP partners are DeDust exchange, Coinvent developer team, Ton Raffles app, and TON FISH memecoin.

The Tech. The Ton Ship litepaper explains that the SHIP is a memecoin project.

The team says the TON blockchain has low fees and high speed, marketing costs are low too and the community is great. The roadmap is focused mostly on launching NFT collections and marketing. They promise to develop a ship-themed game and say that the development has started already.

The Fundamentals. The team calls SHIP a memecoin, so we will look at it as a memecoin. They grow when there’s enough hype and buying volumes. SHIP has enough liquidity to satisfy demand and the roadmap focused on marketing to build the hype. With a mobile game coming soon (we hope so), it might be worth a shot.

The Website. For the TON SHIP website, SimilarWeb shows 1.1K total visits per month with Russia, Japan, and South Korea being the main sources of traffic. It would be better to see more countries on the list.

Conclusions. For a new memecoin, the holder count of 1000+ wallets, $500k+ daily trading volume, price growing 45% in the last week, and mostly marketing-focused roadmap are good. However, the anonymous team without a way to confirm their gaming-related experience talking about a game might raise some suspicions.

If we had $1,000 to invest in projects, we would allocate no more than $100 to SHIP because it is a memecoin in its early stage and has a chance to grow higher, but also can fall when the hype is over.

And that is an example of DYOR of a random project.

Continuing on Researches

We only showed one illustrative research with a proper way of thinking and concluding. The actual serious research is in repeating it over and over for dozens of projects, comparing them with each other, and selecting the best.

Remember, that even the most comprehensive research doesn’t guarantee profits. A portfolio of carefully selected infrastructure projects might go down while aping in a memecoin might bring 10x returns. Never invest more than you can afford to lose and always diversify your holdings. And if you have any questions, you can always ask them in the Tonstakers community.