A Real World Example of DYOR

I recently posted a Do Your Own Research Checklist.

I am going to walk you through my research on Uno Re, a coin I just researched. This post will sort of ramble, but you will see my process of doing research. The order that I list things is the order that I did them. This is not a shill for the coin that I am using. I was researching Uno Re and just made a post out of it. I had no idea what the results would be before I started.

Does the coin have a use? Uno Re is a reinsurance token. I am very bullish on the crypto insurance segment and think that it huge growth potential. Uno Re is the only crypto that I have discovered that is attempting to do reinsurance, that is insuring insurers. Their clients will likely be exchanges and other companies that offer insurance. 10/10

Is the coin being used for its use? They list many partners on their website, including one smaller UK based non-crypto online car insurance company. They also list several “reputable” (meaning I have heard of them) crypto partnerships. I note that their website is very fancy and slick looking. A lot of the information seems to consumer and token holder related, even though the focus of the company is companies. 7/10

I now google “Uno Crypto” with hope for a link to coinmarketcap

Are there other coins with the same symbol? I see on my google results that Unobtanium is the dominate crypto with same symbol. Many people have heard of Unobtanium and Uno Re is not trying to confuse itself with Unobtanium in my opinion. This is a negative, but not a red flag in my book. 5/10

What chain is the coin on? ERC-20, I like this, but in the back of my head I think FEES for a small investment. 10/10

Exchanges? I look and see that it is on Kucoin and Uniswap. I love that it is on a real, non obscure exchange. That makes investing a small amount a lot cheaper in my book. Most coins that I research are not on a “real” exchange. I also take a moment to look at the trading volume and it looks acceptable 8/10

Number of Coins? I se that the max coin number is 380,539,316, but it is not showing a distributed amount. I then go to cryptorank which lists some additional information usually, if their SEO was better I would have gone to it first. Circulating supply 6,980,159. This can be a massive problem, this could not be a massive problem. Red Flag*. I will investigate this as a do more research.* 1/10

I then go to the IDO tab, this is not on my list, but I like the resource that crypto rank provides in this manner. I see an IDO of $0.12 for 200k/1,666,667 tokens. I see a private sale of 41,239,316 tokens at $0.06 with a 6-12 month lockup. I then scroll and see the distribution. I want to know the vesting/lockup of all the tokens. Since it listed it for the private sale, I think it is available, which is a good thing, my guess is in the white paper. I like the $0.06 private sale number. I don’t think with the vesting/unlocking they are going to tank the market below this level initially. I then click on the IDO Medium links and get error 410. WTF my brain says, why is Uno Re’s Medium account under violation for breaking Medium rules? I then realize that they have the address backwards and Uno Re does have a non-suspended, active Medium.

I now go to the Uno Re website

Are the founders and team doxxed? Yes, I don’t do a lot of back research on them.

White Paper? They have an extensive white paper. It looks good, their processes make sense. They included some technicals that I wanted included and touched on some detail points that if they were just BS I didn’t think they would include (they all left out some potential details, but to include all details would take forever). I spend extra time looking at the distribution of the tokens. All of the vesting schedules are listed, but we don’t really know when the begin. The clear release of the coins is not listed. I think that most would start in 4/21 at the earliest. 120 million of the coins are being kept in reserve for a black swan event, if they were released this would have a big negative on the price. This then puts 260MM (I’m old, MM=million) coins available, 7MM active, 42MM sold and will start to vest in a couple of months. The team’s tokens are locked for 2 years and the advisors are vested for 12 months, this is good. 8/10, not including the coin supply issue, Coin supply issue 3/10

I try to find a crypto events calendar and fail (this is not a red flag and is used as more information, many cryptos aren’t listed on those sites)

Social Media? They have over 50k telegram subscribers. They have a very ample twitter presence. They are running a Kucoin and Uniform promo with rather aggressive interest rates for staking. Again, they seem to be focused on consumer awareness for their token, even though their clients are companies. They will need consumers for the back end of the system, to support the clients, so it somewhat makes sense, but still seems like a lot of effort. 5/10

Do the staking returns and ‘promos’ make sense? I investigate this a little more. These rewards are coming out of the Community, Incentive, and Rewards bucket and they are to drive initial adoption of the token. It is not exactly the method that I would take, but all of the pools are set time period pools and not ongoing 5/10

I then research things a little bit more, looking for more info on the distribution schedule and find a Medium article written by Uno Re saying that the private sale 42MM will be unlocked August 27. This is during the staking periods, but the cost was $0.06 so there is real incentive to make it not drop below that number. I also look at the max staking caps and realize that they are decent and there might be some pumping going on with all of the staked coins if there is buying pressure, before the investor coins are released. I also discovered a graph of when all the coins were going to be released which helped explain/understand the 8MM vs 380MM red flag***.*** They claim to have 2-3 years of operational expenses

Conclusion

That touched on just about every point I had in the list, some I did not explicitly list, but where discovered while doing the above steps. This obviously is not a shill for Uno Re and I have not included how I would treat the coin. I approach all of my analysis where I want the coin to succeed so I get a baseline to compare them.