Check in 5 minutes whether to trust a new crypto project

Not a deep audit — just enough to catch the most obvious problems before you commit any money.

Run through these before you buy, invest, or contribute time to a new project. Each one takes under a minute:

• Does the contract show as verified on the block explorer? (Etherscan, BscScan, etc.) If it's not verified, nobody outside the deployer can even read what the code does.
• Can you find the team anywhere else online? Search their names, not just their project's Twitter. A LinkedIn or GitHub history that predates the project by years is a good sign; accounts created the same month as the token is not.
• Is there any audit at all, from anyone? Even a small, lesser-known firm's audit is a different situation than nothing. Check the project's GitHub for an `/audits` folder or a link on their site.
• Is liquidity locked, and for how long? Tools like Team Finance or Unicrypt show this for most tokens. Unlocked liquidity means the team can pull it out and leave at any moment.
• Does the social media age match the story? A Twitter account created two weeks ago claiming "years of development" is a mismatch worth noticing.

Why this matters to you specifically: this checklist won't catch everything — a project can pass all five and still fail for reasons that only show up in the code or the tokenomics. But it takes five minutes and catches the most common, most obvious problems before you've spent any money finding out the hard way.