An approach to investing in crypto protocols that have issued/not issued a token using five broad metrics

Utility/Adoption

Nothing says this new project/protocol might survive one or several bear markets and continue to grow through them like adoption from other crypto projects and a continually growing developer community as well as a real world use case. Utility is not strictly necessary however, as can be seen with Doge, sometimes community is more important.

Market Capitalization

Market caps are more of a reference point as this is all new and it is difficult to accurately say how big these projects can get. However, when trying to narrow down your investment decision, the lower the market cap the larger the potential upside. The larger the market cap, the investment poses less risk but also has less upside.

Circulating Supply

Protocols with a maximum supply of less than 1billion units are a digital scarcity dream. I try to optimize for coins with small supplies. There are exceptions to this however, if the protocol has a large supply of tokens but has useful mechanisms to lock up or burn these tokens to control potential sell pressure; this is also a good sign.

Interoperability

We live in a multi-chain world. User experience still has a long way to go when trying to move assets or transact from one blockchain to another. I firmly believe in a few years most users may not even know which chain they are using. Chain selection will be abstracted away by better and better user experiences. Protocols that facilitate a smooth multi-chain world have the potential to generate significant value.

Income

Income or staking rewards are a good way to hedge against negative price action. This income is usually in the form of a reward in the protocols native token; if the user locks up their tokens for a certain amount of time.