A method rather than a view. Every step is answerable before committing money, and none requires an opinion about price.
1. What instruments exist?
Options book, perpetual, spot only, on-chain only. This decides which readings are available at all — and what is unavailable. Skipping this is how people end up reading a gamma level that was manufactured.
2. Which structural family is it?
An L1, an L2, a governance token, a memecoin, a staking wrapper, a venue token, a wrapped commodity. The family tells you what the demand driver is and what the characteristic failure looks like.
3. What is the float, not the market cap?
Staked supply, vesting schedules and concentration decide how much can actually arrive — market cap is the wrong denominator.
4. Where is the liquidity, and which way is it moving?
Which venue or pool, at what depth, and arriving or leaving. A snapshot cannot answer the second half, and the second half is the one that changes over your holding period.
5. What does the round trip cost at your size?
Exit first, since entry is voluntary and exit frequently is not — the true cost of a round trip. This is where most otherwise-sound ideas fail.
6. Only now, the positioning
Open interest, funding, liquidation structure, and gamma if a book exists. It describes how far a move would travel — the fuel, not the spark.
Why this order
Because a positioning read on an asset you cannot exit is worthless, and a gamma level on a coin with no book is fiction. The cheap structural questions constrain what the expensive analytical ones are allowed to mean.