When we assess a blockchain we typically look into these 4 focus areas:
1. Technicals
Support for EVM/WASM standards. Size of transaction fees (average and peak), throughput measured by TPS and block size, level of decentralization measured by number of active nodes and node requirements.
2. Community & Team
Size of Twitter/Discord/Reddit communities of the network together with all projects building on it, quality of posts in these communities, average engagement level. Number of unique addresses on-chain, number of active wallets per day (at least 1 emitted transaction). Then we take a look at the blockchain’s core team, it’s important to understand who stands behind the project and whether these people have a track record of success. Another important thing is developer activity, which can be measured by Git (e.g. number of commits and pull requests in project-related repos).
3. Liquidity
Liquidity available on-chain measured by TVL, the market cap of stablecoins, the number and quality of DeFi protocols building on chain, size of liquidity in DeFi apps. Also, another aspect is native token liquidity health (ratio between trading volume and total coin market cap). Better liquidity health means that you can sell more tokens without influencing the price.
4. Infrastructure
The available infrastructure needed for dApp projects to build on the chain and for average users to easily interact with the network. This can be measured by the number and quality of wallets, block explorers, node providers, custodians, etc.