I’d suggest looking at the block explorer for any chain to first understand how many validators they have (there are some hot new chains with fewer than 200 validators which may be run by far fewer than 200 people). I’d also take a look at what’s actually being processed - some blockchains have their validators submit regular transactions to vote for the next block, and they can account for 90+% of the TPS the chain claims to have.
I’d then look at how their consensus model behaves - if it’s Delegated Proof of Stake, how are they handling voter apathy where users have very little incentive to change who they delegate to even if the validator they delegate to is misbehaving? What happens to misbehaving validator? Is there some mechanism in the protocol that punishes a validator for doing the wrong thing (aka slashing)?
I’d then dig into how they are any different from the thousands of existing blockchains. Did they centralize by having a few powerful machines run the chain, did they fork the Ethereum Geth code and simply increase the max gas per block to reduce fees and get a higher TPS? Making short-term decisions like that look great in the short term, but will fail over the long run due to state bloat and centralizing forces (large storage, compute, and/or networking requirements).
I’d also recommend reading articles on https://vitalik.ca/ and https://ethresear.ch/. Before you say “won’t those be bias towards Ethereum?” The answer is, sort of… Vitalik writes a lot about technical challenges in the blockchain space and how Ethereum is planning to handle them, but he seems to remain somewhat levelheaded and focuses on how the solutions help retain censorship resistance and security. EthResearch is actually used by people in the Ethereum and non-Ethereum blockchain space since many chains need to solve the same problems and are building on the work of Ethereum researchers. They are pretty open for non-Ethereum discussions there.
I would almost certainly say to avoid the cryptocurrency subreddit (that’s where people go to con others into buying their coins and farm Moons) as well as Twitter - with the exception of epolynya. I recommend reading epolynya‘s tweets because they engage with people who are championing non-Ethereum chains and start technical discussions with them which tend to be very educational. That can get you exposed to how developers on other chains view solutions to technical and economic problems.
It’s a ton of work to keep up to date on the inner workings of all these chains. Reading about the blockchain trilemma and understanding it is a good way to start get a lense to view these blockchain projects through so you can at least tell when a claim smells funny.
