Doing Your Own Research can be overwhelming for users when we are in the heat of the moment. What do we even mean by research? Do we need to have to analyse data, go through the history of a project and create a pros and cons list? Do we need to spend days and months on one project to invest? I think it depends on how much you are investing and what’s the purpose of your investment. Is it a quick money spinning investment or do you want to stay with the project for the next 10-15 years?
This is the second in my series of DYOR - Fail experiment - The Artivas project
It was in the midst of the NFT craze. I am a regular reader on Leofinance. I read most of the new blog posts as I am relatively new myself and I want to boost new bloggers as much as possible. I came across a post from a new account called @artivas. They were offering pre-sale tokens to raise funds for their new art/nft project. I was not able to get into the NFT scene with projects that were already hot and exploding and I thought this was my chance to ride the wave. I expected and assumed the project was legit just because they were posting on Leofinance :P I can laugh at myself for assuming that and thinking they are legit.
Ideally, DYOR comes to play right at this point in time of a project. It is not true that I did not research what the Artivas project was all about. But, as for any new crypto project, sometimes it is not that easy to find a team that has a proven track record. I gave them the benefit of the doubt OR I was blinded by the possibility of aping in early and making some good gains.
But, there were signs that I did not properly understand the risk.
I did not talk to the team on Discord. I did not ask questions about the team members and their previous project histories nor did I ask the team about their detailed project plan. I aped in to test the water with my 2 BNB worth of investment.
The project was launched. It means they had their token listed on Julswap but they never launched the NFT project. They stalled for a month or two and eventually everything went silent. I lost my 2 BNB.
Had I DYOR I would have found red flags all along. They chose to have an account on Leofinance and they made it look like they were blogging on Medium page. A first lie. There was no record of their work anywhere other than Leofinace. Even on the Leo platform, they were anon. They knew that they would get an audience from individuals like myself who are aware of crypto projects.
So, it happened. The project was never launched and the token value of 2 BNB at that point went to $0.0038 - next to ero.
An important lesson that I learned from this experience was - not to trust a project even if they appear on Leofnance. Turns out, I did not learn from the mistake as I aped into another project just because it was associated with Leofinance. That story for the next part of my blog :)