The Real Reason Tokens Don't Sell: 90% of Crypto Projects Overlook Investor Relations

Original Title: The Crypto Native Guide to Investor Relations

Original Author: Mippo, Blockworks Co-founder
Original Translation: Chopper, Foresight News

The core responsibility of the Investor Relations (IR) department is to help the market understand an asset, its strategy, and potential value. It serves as a bridge between the project team and the market.

When I first entered the crypto industry, what people considered "good IR" was actually quite limited. Although we have made some progress in certain areas over the years, we still have a long way to go in terms of how we communicate with investors.

Good IR can expand your buyer base and improve the quality of your holder structure. On the other hand, doing IR poorly or not at all will result in a continuous decline in token value, no matter how great the product is.

Over the past year, we have communicated with almost all top projects in the crypto space to establish investor relations systems, and we are currently serving over 20 projects. This article is a practical guide to investor communication that can be directly implemented.

Distribution is Key

If you want to maximize token value, you only need to look at two factors:

· How many target investors are aware of your token's existence

· How many of these investors convert into buyers

An excellent IR strategy must optimize both of these points simultaneously.

There are essentially two types of potential buyers of your token:

The first type is crypto liquidity funds. They are actively managed institutions that already hold your token or are closely tracking it. For them, the key is value reassessment, showing an institution that valued your token at $1 a path to $5. You need accurate data, a clear narrative, and ongoing proof of progress to achieve this. This involves narrative construction and data presentation.

The second type is large strategic investors or institutions. For example, recent partnerships like Morpho with Apollo, and BlackRock with Uniswap. This operates under a completely different logic: longer sales cycles, stricter due diligence, and the need for a mature product. If you are in the early stages or need funds quickly, to be honest, these institutions are not the right fit for you. But if you are prepared, you should be present where they are: Bloomberg Terminal, institutional summits, and by building offline relationships. You need to apply B2B sales thinking rather than marketing thinking.

Own Your Narrative

If you don't proactively tell your story, the market will do it for you.

The reality is that most protocol data will never be perfect, and that's okay. What's truly problematic is attempting to conceal and staying silent for months. The most common excuse I hear is, "I don't want to get Twitter hate."

A project won't die because it's ridiculed on Twitter, but it will die because it's forgotten by investors. The longer you avoid communicating with the market, the angrier and more disappointed investors will become.

You don't need perfect data; what you need is honesty, context, and a coherent explanation of what matters, what's being improved, and what still needs improvement.

This is the key to building trust, as silence directly destroys trust.

Token Unlocking

Token issuers must respect the supply-demand dynamics.

If you want to understand price trends, all you need to grasp is the supply-demand core factor. Many times, price management is more like a tactical operation to match supply and demand, rather than anything else.

The biggest mistake I've seen is teams starting to think about a response plan only 1-2 months before unlocking. In just 30 days, you don't have time to correct a significant supply-demand imbalance.

Start planning at least 30 weeks in advance, ideally 40-50 weeks. You need time to onboard buyers, find demand uptake, and communicate with investors in case of unlocking delays.

This is a mundane but crucial part of IR, giving yourself a sufficient time window to handle it.

Data Is Your Best Ally

Narrative matters. But by 2026, a narrative without data backing is meaningless.

The most exceptional IR systems use data to make the token easier to understand, compare, and evaluate. The data itself should be able to tell a complete story.

Data can come from various sources:

· Protocol's proprietary data

· On-chain market structure data

· Competitor benchmarking data

· A Real-world Benchmark Case Study to Help Traditional Investors Understand Crypto Behavior

The final category is currently severely underrated. Truly great investor communication involves not just displaying internal dashboards, but helping investors understand the role your protocol plays in a larger context.

For example: You operate a perpetual contract DEX, and the dashboard shows a monthly trading volume of $75 million. Is this good? Is it bad? Who should it be compared to? Should investors buy or run?

I see a lot of data but very little background information in the current crypto industry. Great teams don't just report numbers; they tell a story with numbers.

IR is Not a Procedural Compliance Task

Most people think that investor relations in the crypto industry is the same as in the stock market. The only problem is: IR in the stock market is very dull.

Don't believe it? Listen to Vlad Tenev's perspective.

Vlad envisions a future where financial reports are no longer CFOs dryly presenting to 60 sell-side analysts on Zoom but more like NBA post-game interviews, with a live feel, interaction, and emotion.

I completely agree. We have an 8-year target-oriented, data-supported marketing experience that combines offline and social media. IR should operate in the same way. The goal is not just to "inform the market" but to engage existing investors, deepen their confidence, and expand the potential future holder base.

What will the future look like? Live streaming of financial report days, CEOs having live discussions with industry guests, inviting prominent holders to share insights... Truly interacting with investors to acquire new holders.

Lowering the Entry Cost for Potential Investors

Today, all liquidity funds must prove to LPs the rationality of their holdings. This means due diligence, it means investment reports.

If your protocol lacks public data, research reports, and background information, you are forcing every potential investor to build an analysis framework from scratch.

You are artificially raising the cost for people to invest in you, and the result is that fewer people will be willing to invest in you.

Reduce their difficulty, continuously output high-quality information: research reports, protocol data analysis, ecosystem progress, third-party analysis. Allow fund analysts to easily write reports and include your token in their portfolios.

Without Data Analysis, You Are Essentially Flying Blind

Even the most cutting-edge protocols in the crypto space have a surprisingly weak understanding of their investor base. Foundational behavior analytics are almost non-existent: How long do investors typically hold? Do they start perpetual hedging upon token listing?

However, on-chain data has made the in-depth analysis that stock market IR teams dream of possible.

If an investor claims to be a long-term believer, the truth has long been permanently recorded by on-chain data. Protocols that embed this analytical capability into their IR function will have a significant advantage: not only understanding existing holders but also precisely targeting the next wave of investors.

Transparency Expands Market Size

Most teams instinctively believe that the less disclosure, the safer. However, the opposite is true.

Investors are already bearing uncertainty for your token: unlocks, treasury expenditures, liquidity protocols, non-standardized terms, and more. If you do not provide answers, the market will not overlook these questions but will instead fill in the gaps in the most pessimistic way imaginable.

The cost of insufficient transparency is incalculable; you will never know how many investors have abandoned your token due to incomplete and unverifiable information. This cost is very real.

Success Metrics

People often easily equate IR success or failure with token price. The issue is that the price is too noisy, subject to numerous factors beyond the control of IR: macro trends, liquidity, market sentiment, geopolitical conflicts, and more.

A more reasonable approach is to measure whether IR has improved the quality and breadth of the investor base.

Here are a few key metrics worth tracking:

· Growth in the number of target investors actively following the token

· Growth in high-quality holders in various market segments, especially liquidity pools and strategic institutions

· Changes in holder concentration

· Conversion of investors from initial contact → active due diligence → holding

· Proportion of core holders aligned with the target holding period

· Frequency and quality of investor engagements throughout the year

· Increase in proactive investor inquiries

· Enhanced visibility in target buyer channels

· Measured through direct communication and feedback: Improvement in investors' understanding of your core thesis

For a liquidity fund, a very practical assessment is: compared to a year ago, have more investors established a clear valuation framework for your token.

Not everyone needs to buy in now, but if more people understand how to view your token, know what milestones matter, and what price is attractive, that is real progress.

Success in IR is not just "Did the price go up," but "Have we expanded the potential holder base."

The Road Ahead

We are building toward this because the token landscape is a survival-level challenge for the entire industry. One unfortunate reality is that currently, most tokens do not have investment value. Jason and I genuinely want to address this issue, and years of experience have shown us the way forward.

Tokens should be more transparent and investor-friendly than stocks because they are built on cryptographic infrastructure. Project teams have a strong incentive to move in this direction because it dramatically expands the addressable market.

More importantly, the investor relations space has not seen innovation for a long time. In our view, the future of IR is by no means a dull procedural task but vibrant, multimedia, highly interactive, and proactive. It requires active offline engagement, sparking discussions on social media, and telling engaging stories to attract new investors. This is the direction the industry must take.

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