DeFi investing guide for institutions and retail investors

The system

Cointelegraph Research published its DeFi Investing Guide in 2023. I designed the retrieval and prompt framework behind it, with structured whitepaper parsing, governance evaluation rubrics, and protocol benchmarking templates. The framework converted 50+ protocols of source material into comparative institutional analysis at consistent quality, and the research reached 4M+ readers across retail and institutional audiences.

What the guide covers

Token economics first. The guide breaks down supply, allocation, monetary policy and value capture, and gives the reader a method to verify each claim through analytics tools, audit reports and on-chain metrics.

Governance next. DAO models, tokenholder dynamics and the equity-versus-utility token divide are mapped, with a rubric for conflicts of interest, ethics and concentration of voting power.

Then the frameworks an investor applies before capital goes in. How to dissect a whitepaper, vet a team, compare competitors and flag red signals, with Nansen, DefiLlama, DappRadar and Coin360 as the working toolkit.

Why a framework instead of a report

A report ages the day it ships. A rubric keeps producing. Every protocol went through the same parsing and scoring templates, so the output stayed comparable across 50+ protocols and the quality held from the first to the last.

The same design later became the retrieval-augmented research pipeline I ran at M6 Labs, whose research team contributed to this guide alongside me.