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The DYOR Problem: You Cannot Research What Nobody Shows You

"Do your own research" is good advice and a convenient excuse. When the facts that matter sit in private loan agreements and unpublished documents, telling people to DYOR moves the blame to the person with the least information.

April 20253 min readFounder Blog

"Do your own research" is the most repeated sentence in this industry. It is good advice. It is also, far too often, a way to hand the risk to the person who knows the least. You can only research what you can see, and in tokenized assets the facts that decide whether you get paid are usually the ones nobody shows you.

A real example: the loan nobody could see

In 2023 Goldfinch, a protocol that funded real-world loans with crypto investors' money, suffered a default from Tugende, a Kenyan motorcycle financing company. Tugende had borrowed $5 million through the protocol. According to the team behind Goldfinch, it then lent $1.9 million of that money to its own Ugandan subsidiary, in breach of the loan agreement and without the lenders knowing, and became insolvent. (Yahoo Finance)

The loan was written down by $3.1 million, cutting the value of Goldfinch's main pool by 3.95%, later reduced after a restructuring. In the same year a separate $20 million loan to Stratos, a US credit fund, led to about $7 million being written off. (Messari, RWA.xyz) In June 2026 Goldfinch's flagship product was voted into wind-down. (Eco)

The Tugende loan, step by step. Lenders fund Goldfinch's pool. The pool lends 5 million dollars to Tugende in Kenya. Tugende lends 1.9 million of it to its Ugandan subsidiary, breaking the loan agreement, and lenders are not told. Tugende becomes insolvent. The pool writes the loan down by 3.1 million dollars, a 3.95 per cent cut, later reduced after restructuring. Only the first and last steps were visible to lenders.
The step that caused the loss happened inside a borrower's own accounts. No amount of "own research" by a token holder could have seen it. Source: Yahoo Finance, Messari.

Now ask: what research could a Goldfinch investor have done? They could read the pool's page and the borrower's summary. They could not see Tugende's internal transfers or check its compliance with covenants month by month. The failure happened in exactly the place investors had no view of.

What "own research" can and cannot reach

Most tokenized assets have the same shape. The public part is the token, the yield and a summary. The part that decides your outcome is private: the loan agreement, the property manager's records, the custodian's reconciliation, the valuation behind the price.

Two columns. What an investor can usually see: the token and its price, the advertised yield, a platform summary, and on-chain transfers. What usually decides whether you get paid: the legal agreements and whether they are followed, the borrower's or manager's own accounts, who holds the asset and whether it is reconciled, and how the valuation was done.
DYOR covers the left column. Losses usually come from the right one.

So when a platform says "DYOR" and then keeps the right-hand column private, it is asking you to take responsibility for something it would not let you check.

Designing trust in

We think DYOR should be the floor, not the answer. That is why every Crib Passport lists the documents a claim rests on, labels how strongly each fact is supported, and shows the missing items as clearly as the ones that exist. "We could not find this" is useful information. It tells you where the risk you cannot see is sitting.

Before you do your own research on any tokenized asset, ask the platform for three things:

  1. The actual agreement your return depends on: the loan terms, the operating agreement, the fund documents.
  2. Who checks that it is being followed, and how often they report.
  3. What happened last time something went wrong, on this platform, with a date and a number.

If they cannot give you those, your research is already done.

Sources

  • Yahoo Finance, "Goldfinch writes down failed $5M loan to Kenyan taxi financier", 2023. Link
  • Messari, "State of Goldfinch Q3 2023". Link
  • RWA.xyz, "Case study: the first RWA distressed debt opportunity with Goldfinch's FIDU token". Link
  • Eco, "Tokenized private credit 2026: Maple, Centrifuge, Goldfinch compared". Link