What’s in your toolbox?

A collection of our favorite resources to upgrade your fundamental analysis toolkit; what to look for and how to stay safe when you DYOR

Over the last few weeks, we’ve gone over some big hacks, scams, and exploits, and covered several ways to minimize the risk that they present to you, personally. This week, I scoured our archives & compiled a quick & handy collection of the tools we’ve used & referenced here.

I’ve broken them down into categories, so feel free to bookmark this page as we’ll be adding tools & dapps that we find useful & keeping it updated as we cover new ones. There’s a different tool for every task, and making sure that your fundamental “tool box” is always stocked should be a priority.

Market Overview/FA tools

• Santiment is a suite of tools (both free & paid) that we utilized wayyy back in Fundamental Analysis, Part Two in March of 2021. They’ve only improved since then, adding more scanners including personal favorites of mine, the Strong & Oversold screener & a tracker for NFT “influencer” transactions.
  
  

You’ll want to play around with the free tools & scanners, because there’s honestly so much you can do with them, but even just using the tools available without registration can vastly expand your ability to analyze fundamentals.

• Cauldron is a tool that I showed you how to use to analyze Github activity, back in Fundamental Analysis, Part Five. I won’t go over the “how” again, here, but it’s a handy thing to have available when you just want a snapshot of dev activity.
  
  

• ETH gas station might be a tool you’re familiar with, but it gives some great insights into current market activity on Ethereum.
  
• L2BEAT, L2Fees, and Dune Analytics all analyze various aspects of the market, and specifically Layer 2 solutions. We used these a bit in my article on zkSync by Matter Labs
  
• Chainlist is more an aggregator of chain & rpc data, but I’ve included it here because it is a reliable resource for this info & gives a nice, quick glance at active chains.

• Audit Database from DefiYield aggregates community-sourced audits & is a great first stop if the project’s audit isn’t listed on the website.
  
  

Stacking Sats

Listed here you’ll find some of the various free methods for “stacking sats” that we’ve gone over, with links & a short description. I’ve included them with the security & FA links, because one of the quickest ways to “get got” is by chasing free lunches. These are all methods that I have personally tested over a long enough period of time (year+) that I feel fairly confident in their safety.

That said, BTCPop has had issues that led to some downtime recently, as well as an inside theft (reimbursed by owner with no user deposits impacted, to my knowledge) that you should be aware of. They have handled each situation remarkably well, though, all things considered.

Full disclosure, I absolutely used my ref links because it would be silly not to. Most of these come from my article on “Stacking Sats”, so you can look there for more info.

• Lolli is a service that you’re probably familiar with, as they’ve been in the space for quite a while. Once the extension is activated, you can get cash back from a ton of online retailers, in Bitcoin, for purchases that you were already going to make.
  
• Bitrefill, Fold, and Stormx all allow you to purchase gift cards and get cashback in Bitcoin or an altcoin.
  
• BTCPop and Stakecube have faucets & staking options, and Stakecube also lets you purchase cloud “workers”, which are perpetual mining shares. Generally, I hate cloud mining as a rule, but I started purchasing small amounts of workers over a year ago to test StakeCube, and they’re still paying out a small bit every day.
  
  

Security

• VirusTotal is another tool you might already use, but especially as NFT projects are pushing demos & early builds, it is probably a tool you should be using even more.
  
• Maldoc Scanner by Ty Labs does the same job as VirusTotal, but is aimed more specifically at malicious documents & pdfs. We discussed both of these in one of my more recent articles, “What’s up, .doc?”
  
• REKT database by DefiYield is a compilation of exploits, hacks, rugs, and exit scams. Learning how folks have been rekt in the past is the best way not to get similarly rekt in the future. The history, linked tweets, and deliciously thorough post-mortems are great rabbit holes to go down if you’re interested in attacks & bad actors.
  
  

We’ll update this as we test & verify the safety of new tools, platforms, and services that you might find useful. Be sure to bookmark this page, and let us know in the comments here or on Twitter what tools you use to stay safe & I might check them out for a future article.