You are not safe in crypto until you do this. The information I'm sharing here is what I believe every single person in crypto needs to know, because in my experience this entire system is so fraudulent it would absolutely shock you. So I want to show you how to see through the lies, the fraud, and the marketing hype yourself. None of this is financial advice — it's how I personally research and what I've come to believe after years of doing it.
Why almost no one in crypto is telling you the truth
The first thing you need to know is that almost everything you see on YouTube and X is something where someone else has done whatever it takes to get you to see it. If I make videos talking about how all these altcoins are going to go up, bots will push my videos to make sure you see them. And if I make videos — which I do — saying that these altcoins are going to zero, bots come through and try to destroy my videos to shut me up. So almost everyone who is saying something is hyping, or saying it's going to go up, has either taken money to say that or is trying to get bots to push their content.
Once you know that, you realize you cannot trust almost any creator you're going to see, unless you can be absolutely certain of two things. One, that they have enough experience to actually know what they're talking about. I've been in crypto since 2014. I've researched thousands of altcoins. I've made hundreds of thousands of dollars while being honest, most of the time, in crypto. So I've got the experience. Two, that they actually care about you more than they care about making themselves money. I could make myself hundreds of thousands of dollars a month if I would just lie to you and dump altcoins on you repeatedly and take the money that's offered to me — money from the altcoins themselves, money from the exchanges. If I was willing to do that, I believe I could make myself a millionaire within this year. But I'd have to sacrifice my soul and feel like a disgusting person, and I am not willing to do that.
I had a third point in mind, but I'll be honest, I was doing this off the top of my head and it slipped away from me. So let's stick with the two that matter most.
The two questions to ask about every crypto creator
For every single cryptocurrency creator you watch, you need to ask yourself those two questions. One, do they unconditionally care about you more than they care about making themselves profitable? In my opinion, ninety-plus percent of crypto creators will fail that particular question — because why do you think someone got into crypto in the first place? To make money, not because they care about you. I just happen to care about you, and I was already in crypto.
The second question is about experience, and it's where a lot of well-meaning people fall down. A lot of people do have good hearts and are genuinely trying to help you. They just don't know any better than going around saying everything's going to be okay. They don't want to hype, but their own self-centeredness still dictates the logic: "If I'm a YouTuber and I want more views, I should talk positive like everybody else, and then the bots will all push my account." So if someone's clueless — and a lot of these crypto creators who seem honest are so clueless — what they say isn't even valid, because anyone could just look at a price chart and start talking.
So what you need to be able to do is ask those two questions about every creator you watch, and then literally stop watching, unsubscribe, block, and hide from your feed anyone who doesn't meet them. If you can't be sure they care about you more than their own money — and that should be pretty easy, because if they're consistently promoting altcoins, especially some of the stereotypical ones, they probably don't care about you more — and if you don't know what they're actually holding or what experience they have, then don't watch them. I go deeper on this in the huge lies crypto YouTubers are telling you, and it's the same reason I keep my honest reviews going in my Money playlist rather than chasing whatever the bots want to push.
How I research a coin in five to ten minutes
The most helpful thing I can give you is to show you how to do that research yourself, in real time, because the only way you're going to know a creator doesn't care about you is to prove them false. You need to be able to do this in five or ten minutes. Once you catch people lying to you, you know to stop watching them, and you know to sell those coins. You also need to be willing to admit when you're wrong — to be like, "Oh, okay, I got tricked into this. All right, I'm going to get out of that."
I did this live, and I asked people in the chat to give me a coin I hadn't reviewed yet. Someone dropped one in, and I'd never looked at it before. Here's the basic way I go through it. If you want a fuller walkthrough of the mindset, I wrote out how to do your own research (DYOR) in cryptocurrency as well.
Start with the exchange, the volume, and the market cap
The first thing that looked bad on this one: it was only on a single exchange, SafeTrade, which I haven't even used before. That's a bad sign on its own. Then it had a tiny amount of volume against a huge market cap — several hundred million dollars — and it was sitting at the highest price it had ever been. That combination already felt kind of nasty to me. You should be able to do this yourself, but I know it can feel like a lot at first.
Look for the team behind the project
The next thing I do is look at the website, and the main thing I look for is the team. Which people are behind this? Because most of these altcoin scams the crypto mafia sets up can only trick, convince, bribe, or coerce a couple of people at best into putting their faces out for the project. The worst of the coin-launch scams — which is most of them — won't even have a single face behind them. So look around: where's the team, where's a real person behind this?
This one actually had people, and they had Twitter profiles at least, so it was much better than average. I've seen projects that paid off big creators to talk about them and didn't even have a page like this. But still — a page without a single picture, does that merit a hundred-million-dollar-plus project? It listed three to five developers and a software engineer, which is decent, but are you going to bet that five developers means the project is, at best, accurately valued? I go straight to the people behind the project every time.
Check how long it's been around and how active they are
You can also look at how long it's been around. This one had been around four years and was still only on one exchange. That's probably not a good project — probably not something that's going to be successful. Then check their YouTube account if they have one, and see how active they are. This project had thirty-six thousand subscribers, but they weren't even putting out new content — there hadn't been a single YouTube video in the last six months. The view counts looked like they'd been hit with paid ads or bots. They were posting videos when the project was new, which is very common, but the marketing had basically stopped.
The lead developer on the project gives me a certain vibe — I genuinely couldn't tell at first whether I was looking at a paid actor or an actual team member, though it turned out to be the lead developer. His X profile had a couple thousand followers. For the lead developer of a project, that tells me it's probably not going to be the next big thing. If this were a one-million-dollar market cap, that's one thing, but at a hundred million, it does not look like it's going so well.
This is also why the most dangerous kind of project, in my opinion, is one that is launching. In ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, I'd recommend you do not get into a project until it has launched and been out for at least a year, ideally multiple years. The main way people get ripped off in crypto is on projects that are launching — projects that make huge promises and have delivered no real value.
Read the chain explorer
I also check the chain explorer to get an idea of what's actually happening. This one described itself as zero-knowledge technology. I look for things to invest in — like the Internet Computer — that are doing something absolutely nothing else is doing, with huge potential. To me, almost everything in crypto is basically a Bitcoin or Ethereum copy, or a copy of another one of those copies. This coin looked like a copy of copies: small algorithm changes, nothing fundamentally new.
And the explorer confirmed it. There was very little happening on the blockchain. Pretty much all that was going on was mining — it was an absolute ghost chain. You hardly even saw a block with more than two transactions; one had seven and it stood out. There were three minutes between some blocks and six minutes between others. The technology looked like crap, to be blunt. Between the website and the explorer, you can usually qualify or disqualify something pretty quickly.
My honest verdict on this coin
Keep in mind, I was seeing this for the very first time, in real time, even though I've looked at thousands of altcoins. My basic impression was this: it's probably the worst time ever to buy this coin. It's mostly a dead project that they're desperately trying to keep alive, the technology looks irrelevant, it's barely on any exchanges, the founder has a small X account, and the YouTube channel is almost dead like they're giving up on it. And remember — this one was better than most.
So in my honest opinion, this coin sucks and looks like it's going to zero. There's no way I would invest in it, not with a hundred-million-dollar market cap and everything I just walked through. And I've looked at projects far worse than this, where you literally don't have a single person listed on the website and the only information you can find is paid influencers talking about how great it's going to be. None of this is financial advice — it's my experience and my opinion — but if you assume that ninety-plus percent of all coins are purely launched to make as much money for the insiders as possible, with the least effort, and to take the most of your money with the least effort, then you know what you're really in for.
I see this pattern constantly. People message me saying, "Jerry, I love ICP, and I've got this other coin." I'll say, "Oh, I've never heard of that one." And the response is always, "Yeah, it's a lot like ICP." So I go look at the website and the price chart, it takes me a few minutes, and almost every time I come back and say, "That sucks." Someone sent me a coin recently that they were heavy into alongside ICP, insisting it was a lot like ICP. I went to the website — it only had a test net, and it was talking about how it was partnering with Amazon Web Services. That is not anything at all like ICP. That's another fraudulent coin launch.
Why I keep coming back to the Internet Computer
Something that makes researching all of this easier is to also research the Internet Computer Protocol, because it gives you a baseline for what real substance looks like. Once you see the Internet Computer team, once you look at the DFINITY Foundation, you start to expect a certain standard — this is the largest research and development team in blockchain, in my view. Some of these fraudulent teams are even claiming they have a slightly bigger team than DFINITY despite not having launched anything yet, which is wild. Look at the DFINITY team, look at all the pictures of the engineers, and look at the sheer quantity of talent there. The Internet Computer is the one altcoin I love after researching thousands, and I explain why in the 1 altcoin I love after researching 1000s.
This is also the kind of conviction the Jerry Banfield Family is built around — if you want to research alongside people who care more about the truth than the hype, that's where I keep the real conversations going.
Use the technology yourself
If you really want to research something, you need to be able to use the technology — use the coin itself. This is where ninety-nine percent of stuff fails. With most projects, all you can do, at best, is send transactions. And I can promise you that a coin that only sends transactions is not going to do great over the long term. Bitcoin and Ethereum have already locked that down — they do well at sending transactions, not great, but well — and there's already a bunch of coins at the top for sending transactions and for creating other coins. The coin that's going to really outshine everything else has to be able to do something nothing else can do, and as far as I can see, that's only the Internet Computer.
With ICP you can actually use the technology yourself. OpenChat, for example, is an application running directly on the Internet Computer Protocol — you can see what it's doing, and you can use the technology itself rather than just taking someone's word for it. Someone in the chat, Igor, asked me for five coins other than ICP that don't suck — and honestly, most of the ones I'd name are coins built on ICP. I keep all of this going in my ICP Crypto playlist if you want to go deeper.
So that's the whole point: you are not safe in crypto until you can do this research yourself, come in with an extremely skeptical mindset, and refuse to trust anyone who can't pass those two questions. It's extremely easy for somebody to launch a coin and hype up why it's great. What's genuinely difficult is to give real value to something — and learning to tell the difference yourself is what keeps you safe. If learning to do it with a community sounds good to you, you're always welcome to join the Family and research right alongside me.