By the end of this lesson you’ll be able to check who stands behind a project and read its white paper against what EU law requires. You’ll also be able to say what its audits do and don’t cover, and find out who can change its code.
Check who runs it
Every project has people behind it, even one that says it’s run by code. Find out who they are and what they’ve done before.
Named founders
Named founders are the easiest to research when they have a record you can check elsewhere: earlier companies, published code or past work.
A pseudonym
Bitcoin’s creator wrote under a pseudonym, so anonymity alone rules nothing out. What it removes is anyone to check, and anyone to hold to account if the money disappears.
Backers
Early investors usually hold a large slice of the supply on a vesting schedule, as lesson 2 showed, and they bought it far below the public price.
The legal entity
Look for a company name and the country it’s registered in. That’s who you’d be dealing with if anything went wrong. The country is one of the things that decides which rules apply, along with where the token is offered.
Then set the team’s claims against what you can see for yourself. In its 2023 case against Terraform Labs, the SEC alleged the company told investors that a Korean payments app settled the app’s payments on the Terra blockchain, and that the claim misled them. In April 2024 a jury found the company and its chief executive, Do Kwon, liable for fraud.
A claim about partners, users or revenue is worth exactly as much as the evidence for it outside the project’s own posts.
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