DYOR Tool - Butane - Google Sheets

	A	B	C
1
2	Development Team
3
4
5	1	DT1-1
6	Category	Development Team
7	Name	Conflict of Interest Disclosure
8	Question	Are you Affiliated with the project or own any tokens?
9	Options	Yes	No
10	Points	0	0
11	Worksteps:
12	A:	Quesion is asking if you are affiliated with the project (part of the dev team, on payroll, partnered) or own any of it.
13	B:	If yes, explain in the box below.
14	Why this matters?
15	This tool is designed so that anyone can create a report for any project they are interested in. From a newcomer learning about crypto for the first time to experienced investors to members of the dev team that want to produce a report and share it with their community. If someone owns the token they create the report for or are part of the team producing them, they have a direct financial interest in the project's success and therefore, they may be more inclined to give a higher score or make things look better than they truly are. It is what we commonly refer to as a conflict of interest. Because of this, we are starting the DYOR Tool with a disclosure where the report creator can explain any relationship they may have with the team or financial interest in the project so that they are completely transparent with the readers. Now, can we guarantee that people will be honest and disclose everything? Of course not. Someone could write whatever they want and it would be very difficult to verify. But there are also a lot of honest people out there who value their credibility and would happily share their interest in the project. This disclosure is for those people. Lastly, just because someone owns the project doesn't mean they would necessarily make an inaccurate or misleading report.
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17	Answer:
18
19	2	DT2-2
20	Category	Development Team
21	Name	Read Whitepaper
22	Question	Did you read the whitepaper?
23	Options	Yes	No
24	Points	0	0
25	Worksteps:
26	A:	Read the whitepaper (usually found on website).
27	Why this matters?
28	There are not points awarded for this section that will affect the scoring. But we wanted to include this as your first point of research on your journey to properly evaluating a project because it is important and it will aide you in answering many of the subsequent questions. You have likely been told to read the whitepaper several times on social media or by friends and there is a good reason. The whitepaper is meant to contain all the information you need to understand the project. It can give background, a breakdown how it functions, information on the tokenomics, and anything else the writers decided to include in it. But as important and beneficial as this step can be, I have always gotten the impression that very few people actually do it. I have also gotten the impression that many people who tell you to read the whitepaper do not seem to have done it themselves. Now you might be thinking, a lot of this stuff is beyond my understanding so why even bother? Well first of all, you might be surprised. There are some extremely technical papers out there, but there are also a lot of easy to understand ones as well. Or it may be a situation where pieces of it are confusing but large chunks of it are within your wheelhouse. That's OK friend. Try and read it anyways. Google is your friend and if there is something you do not understand you can always read up on it our create a post on Reddit to learn more. And I promise you that while you may start out having difficulties, the more you do and the more you stick with it, the better you will become. This is how learning works and being lousy at something is usually the first step to being great at something. So bite the bullet, give it a shot, and I think you will be surprised at how much you are actually able to absorb. Good luck.
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30	Answer:
31
32	3	DT3-3
33	Category	Development Team
34	Name	Anonymous Team
35	Question	Is the Development Team Anonymous?
36	Options	Yes	No
37	Points	0	4
38	Worksteps:
39	A:	Review project website to check if team is listed.
40	B:	List each member listed in box below.
41	Why this matters?
42	Practically all exit scams and rug pulls are performed by anonymous teams. Why do you suppose that is? I think that the simplest answer is that if you are going to commit a crime, it is infinitely easier to get away with it if nobody knows who you are. The exact same reason that bank robbers choose to wear a mask. If you commit fraud and steal millions from investors, the police will hunt you down and you will face consequences for your actions. At the very least, you will be labeled a charlatan and will not be able to easily do the same thing in the future. If you commit fraud and steal millions of investors while remaining completely anonymous, you will never really face any consequences for your actions and will be able to continue doing it again and again. Now, does this mean that any dev team that chooses to remain anonymous is 100% going to commit fraud and steal? Of course not. There are lots of brilliant, hard-working, and trustworthy developers out there that might prefer to be anonymous, and that is their right. But the good teams who choose to remain anonymous are normalizing the practice which leaves the door wide open for the bad teams to steal over and over again. We as a community should not be willing to invest in or use any dApp where the dev team has chosen to be anonymous, as this potential for fraud will always be present. We have no way to sort the trustworthy teams from the untrustworthy and are left in a situation where we are essentially just hoping that people do the right thing. If a dev team wants us to trust them enough to use and invest in their products, they must give us a reason to trust them. Revealing themselves is a loud and clear message to the investing community that they will do right by us and if they do not, they will suffer the consequences. The good teams who choose to remain anonymous are normalizing the practice which leaves the door wide open for the bad teams to steal over and over again.
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44	Answer:
45
46	4	DT4-4
47	Category	Development Team
48	Name	Identity Verification
49	Question	Can you verify that each member of the Development team is a real person?
50	Options	Yes	No
51	Points	2	0
52	Worksteps:
53	A:	List each person obtained in project website in box below
54	B:	If links to LinkedIn Github, or other websites are provided, click through each link and review the information to determine if it looks genuine. Genuine profiles would likely have a long history, several contacts, current information, recommended skills, etc.
55	C:	If no links are provided, you will need to manually search. Begin with Google for general information. Check LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Github, and twitter to see if you can locate a profile that matches each person.
56	D:	If you have reason to doubt the profiles you have found were authentic, use google image search for each profile picture that was provided. Instructions for using Google search can be found here (https://support.google.com/web search/answer/1325808?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop). Ensure image is not a stock photo and can be traced to a matching social media platform.
57	E:	For any profiles found using workstep C, perform the review from Workstep B.
58	F:	If you discover the team info is fake, go back to TD1 and change the answer to Yes
59	G:	Save links to supporting information in this workstep to support your review.
60	Why this matters?
61	Simply verifying that there are people listed on the project website is insufficient. It is not unheard of for a team to list fake people on the website to give the appearance they have all revealed their identities when they have not. Because of this, you must do a little work verifying that each person listed is real. Ideally there will be links included with each name and photo in the teams section that direct you to each persons LinkedIn account, Github, Medium, or any other socials that are used to corroborate identity and professional credentials. Many teams will provide these freely because they want to make it easy for you to verify them. If links are not provided, that is frustrating but not necessarily a red flag. Go through the worksteps that are listed here to try to find various social media accounts to confirm their identity and credentials. Even if you do find a LinkedIn account or social media account, that doesn't guarantee that the information is legitimate. Any good scammer would have gone through the trouble of creating a fake identity for each person they listed in the website. You will need to use some of your past experience and common sense to review what is available and determine if it is legitimate. You have likely seems hundreds of LinkedIn profiles or Twitter/IG accounts and can spot things that look funny. Hardly any contacts. A ton of contacts but barely and activity. There are all kinds of things that can appear unusual and are too many to list here, but you will need to review the information and determine if you think it appears legitimate. And typically finding several sources online that can be compared and cross referenced to each other provides additional assurance that the person is real (e.g. has LinkedIn profile with several connections and people who have attested to a certain skill the person has, has a Facebook or IG account with similar pictures that appears legitimate, has a few articles written about them from various third party publications that you are familiar with). If you do determine that there are people listed in the website but they appear to be fake people, that is going to be a huge red flag. Honesty and reputation are extremely important and a team that is willing to mislead on this would likely be willing to mislead in other areas as well. It is possible that there are reasonable explanations or it is a rare instance where a person has no online presence, but anyone should proceed extremely cautiously if they are having trouble verifying the teams identities.
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63	Answer:
64
65	5	DT5-5
66	Category	Development Team
67	Name	Prior Experience
68	Question	Does the Dev team have the proper experience to execute this project?
69	Options	Yes	No
70	Points	0.5	0
71	Worksteps:
72	A:	Review LinkedIn and Github accounts found in Question 2 for background and credentials of team.
73	B:	For each position, check if education, work experience, or Github contributions are relevant to role in project. If they have education, work experience, or Code repositories to demonstrate their relevant experience in their field, that is adequate for this question.
74	C:	List each team member in the box below along with a description of their experience and assessment if it is relevant.
75	Why this matters?
76	Prior experience is extremely valuable in assessing if something is going to be successful going forward. As they say, the best way to predict the future is to study the past. So having a team that has a successful history with blockchain or previous start ups suggests that they will have success with the project you are currently researching. Blockchain is also a very new and fast paced industry, so having a team with experience navigating it makes it more likely that they will be successful. Now does this mean that just because someone was successful in the past it is a guarantee they will always be successful? Of course not. Each project needs to be assessed on its own merits independent of the last, but having that prior experience to leverage will usually provide an edge and increase the chances of its success. It is also important to research prior experience because of anything negative that might turn up. Just like prior positive experience being a good indicator that the current project will be successful, prior negative experience is just as good an indicator that you might want to avoid. Was someone on the team involved in some type of fraud or illegal behavior in the past? Have they released a product that is getting large amounts of complaints from their users or investors? This is all information that you can use to assess if the current project they are working on will have a similar outcome. Just remember that the past helps us assess the future, but it doesn't guarantee anything, positive or negative.
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78	Answer:
79
80	6	DT6-6
81	Category	Development Team
82	Name	Audit
83	Question	Has the project successfully completed an audit by a reputable service provider?
84	Options	Yes	No
85	Points	1	0
86	Worksteps:
87	A:	Scroll through the project website to see if they have a section on their audit status and if they have a link to the audit report.
88	B:	If it is not mentioned on the website, google the project name and the word audit. If it is popular, there are likely articles written about it that will pop up.
89	C:	If nothing is found in the first two steps, try scrolling through their twitter feed, as it will usually be announced there.
90	D:	If nothing is found still, ask a direct question on their twitter, telegram, or discord and someone will be able to point you towards it.
91	E:	If the audit was found, list the name of the auditor and the date of completion in the box below. If the audit report is available include a link to it as well.
92	F:	If you are unfamiliar with the auditor, Google them and see what results turn up to determine if they are reputable (If there are complaints about them. If there are other projects you are familiar with audited by them. Etc.)
93	Why this matters?
94	A third-party audit by an independent reputable service provider is a crucial step in establishing trust with potential investors and users. It is important to have people who are not affiliated with the project review the code and can attest that it is free from any bugs, exploits, or vulnerabilities. Just think about this rationally for a second, how much would you trust the dev team if they say they have looked everything over and it is safe to use? You can see how there is a conflict of interest here because the dev team could be the ones who have programmed the application to do something malicious, so taking their word for it is probably not a great idea. There are also instances where the dev team has not done anything wrong intentionally, but they still could have programmed in things that could harm investors accidentally. By having a fresh set of eyes reviewing their work, you have a good chance at finding things that the original team may have overlooked. It is also important that you assess the people who are performing the audits. Reputation is important and the firms that do a good job will have built a solid reputation for themselves. If it is one you have never heard of or cannot find any information about online, you would usually have less faith in that audit work. Now does this mean that if it has an audit it is 100% safe to use? Unfortunately no. Read any audit report and there will be plenty of disclaimers about how any audit only provides limited assurance and they themselves will not guarantee the safety of the application. So while not 100%, it is still a good sign that the dev team cares about their product and wants to make sure its safe to use, and professionals have reviewed it and hopefully caught anything major.
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96	Answer:
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99	7	DT7-7
100	Category	Development Team