The 9 key elements in any crypto project's roadmap strategy. These are the same elements used by venture capitalists and professional investors when investing in and tracking Fintech Projects. I show you how to do it with BAT (Basic Attention Token)

You must look back at the right elements of a crypto/blockchain coin to accurately predict its future !

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. So the mantra goes in 2018 throughout the crypto/blockchain community.

Actually what would be better to say in this current state of affairs is that the tough get reading and probing. They will hover over the smouldering and ravaged plains of our current crypto landscape and hoover up the right information to make the smart decisions. Information that actually resides right under our noses !

Put less cryptically  the smart money relies deeply upon project roadmaps to navigate their way profitably through the crypto bear market of early 2018. (the same rules apply in a bull market of course, but the downside of not doing so is less)

A Brief Roadmap Segway - Napoleon's disastrous Russian Campaign of 1812.

Please checkout the following image which is a wonderful graphical depiction of what happens when one travels on an important mission without an adequate roadmap. 

This was Napoleon's disastrous journey to Moscow. The red ribbon represents the resources (ie manpower ) that began the ill fated campaign from France to Russia and the black ribbon, that shrinks and shrinks, represents the dwindling manpower that returned ! 

What's more the author also added in dimensions based on temperature, direction of travel, longitude and latitude. It truly is a piece of art in the world of graphical depictions. 

[Image source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Minard)

Just imagine how effective it would have been to understand this campaign, on the ground, in real time with a roadmap like the one depicted above. 

Imagine the tactical insights you would have as you watch the diagram fill out with information in real-time and the accurate predictions you could make ! 

Now remember the smart money watches crypto/blockchain projects with an eagle-eyed view like the one depicted above. It is easy for us non-institutional /non-professional investors to become stuck in a two dimensional view 'hodled' in our trenches on the ground.

It's vitally important that we take some decisive action to elevate our view! 

Please watch my video on roadmaps. It covers the same content as my article below. 

Now back to Crypto's

Currently many good crypto projects are sitting 70%- 90% down from their "All Time High's" (ATH's ) in our last December/January period. 

Yes there are huge bargains to be had with some powerful multipliers at play if you pick the right project. People say hey the fundamentals haven't changed so they should bounce back. But projects get old, time passes, project teams get burnt out or poached, competition increases and those ICO funds gradually dissipate over time. 

Returning back to and beyond previous ATH's is no guarantee for a project that is older than a year. ( even 6 months is a long time in this space)

The million dollar question for an investor then is which diamond in the rough to pick !

Let us look at Grit, Determination, Integrity and how these qualities will show up on a roadmap.

This lead me to think about what are the qualities of a winning a crypto project beyond the hype cycle of their ICO launch? Well many factors could be included;

• technology 
• project team
• advisers
• marketing
• a good idea 
• a MVP (minimum viable product)
• testnet/ mainnet
• token economics
• funding
•  the category the project operates in

         ( to name but a few!)

Key though is what are the human qualities that ties all of these together ? To me it is clear and simple; 

Grit and Determination. 

A project team must have Grit and Determination to move its project beyond the initial idea stage. 

How do you know if a person or a team has grit and determination. Well these are innate qualities in a person, but luckily for us the outcomes are observable. 

The answer- webcams in the offices of your favourite project team's office !

Joking, what we have instead are the words of the project team. Yes the team's grit and determination is observable through the words they both say and write. And if they show grit and determination to achieve what they say they would, then they display integrity.  

Integrity

Let us reflect on the word integrity for a second. Integrity essentially means "a sense of wholeness". Does your favourite project's team have a sense of wholeness?

Sure you can pull apart some code from GitHub or watch a youtube clip of someone performing a bazillion TPS. But behind that video clip or GitHub code snippet resides the words of the team. 

Let's think of fundamentals that run deeper than code or marketing videos. Those are just outputs that  were written/created to achieve something set out from a vision that was put into a document. 

Sitting behind the technical specifications, the functional specifications, the regression testing, the load balancing, the user case scenarios, user stories and marketing plans et al is set of action points laid  out in a roadmap. 

Any laymen should be able to read them and understand them. And more importantly measure the team on them ! 

This is the golden ticket for us to measure our favourite project against. Sure we could download the whitepaper put the team in a room and grill them on each point. But unless we are rich and powerful we don't get to jump in our lear jet along with our team of propeller heads and bean counters and fly to silicon valley for a rowdy shareholder intervention meeting like some sort of Gordon Gecko in Wall Street. 

What we get though is something nearly as powerful if used smartly.  The 9 key roadmap elements;

If your chosen project fails on any of these following 9 simple tests, then it fails its sense of wholeness and integrity. If so the alarm bells should be ringing load and clear !

• 1. Does the team have a roadmap?
• 2. Does the team have the original ICO launch whitepaper on their website?
• 3. Does the roadmap match the promises of the whitepaper ?
• 4. Has the team kept to the promises on their roadmap ? 
• 5. Have they apologised/acknowledged when they didn't keep their promises ? Failing to meet objectives happens in every project, but a good team should never hide their failings ! 
• 6. In connection with the above point - be very sceptical of a project that lists zero roadmap failures or missed deadlines. (Keep an ear out for authentic communications. Usually the communication team will positively enjoy singing the praises of a  project team that burns the midnight oil to finish just on time or just after the deadline). If there is nothing like this, watch out it could be a Bernie Madoff style organisation ! 
• 7. Have they revised their roadmap. (as they say  No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy )
• 8. Does the project team timestamp and curate their roadmap information and provide it in a central location. 
• 9. The team's responsiveness to questions on their roadmap.

Point 9 is very important here. This requires you to step up and become an active investor; head over to telegram/reddit/medium etc and directly quiz them if you can't find the above information on any of these 9 points.

Always always allow the team a right of reply before you condemn them to the dustbin! 

What you will end up with is a scorecard like below; 

Here I have applied my own rules and weightings to a fantastic project; BAT (Basic Attention Token). These guys really do invest time and effort into communicating their roadmap to their community. To me it is a shining example of grit and determination and hence why I will invest more into this excellent project as it matures !

Here is a link to a more detailed examination of BAT on my blog posting; https://steemit.com/basic/@ozkdawg/one-year-on-basic-attention-token-roadmap-review

Please note that everything on this blog post is educational advice and is not financial advice. Please do your own research before investing.