The real reason why tokens are not selling: 90% of crypto projects neglect investor relations
Original Title: The Crypto Native Guide to Investor Relations
Original Author: Mippo, Co-founder of Blockworks
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, a "good IR" was just that. Over the years, while we have made progress in some areas, we are still far from achieving the level of communication with investors that we should have.
Good IR can broaden your buyer base and improve the quality of your holder structure. Poor IR, or even no IR at all, will cause your token to decline, regardless of how excellent the product is.
In the past year, we have communicated with almost all leading projects in the crypto space to build investor relations systems and have provided services for over 20 projects. This article is a practical guide for direct investor communication.
Distribution is Key
If you want to maximize token value, you only need to consider two factors:
· How many target investors know your token exists
· How many of those investors convert into buyers
An excellent IR strategy must optimize both of these points.
There are essentially two types of potential buyers for tokens:
The first type is crypto liquidity funds. They are actively managed institutions that already hold your token or are continuously tracking it. For them, the core is value reassessment, allowing an institution that values your token at $1 to see a path to $5. You need to achieve this through precise data, clear narratives, and continuous proof of progress. This is the work of narrative building and data presentation.
The second type is large strategic investors or institutions. For example, recent collaborations like Morpho with Apollo, and BlackRock with Uniswap. This operates under a completely different logic: longer sales cycles, stricter due diligence, and you need a mature product. If you are in the early stages or need funding in the short term, frankly, these types of institutions are not suitable for you. But if you are ready, you should appear where they are: Bloomberg terminals, institutional summits, and through offline networking. You need to adopt a B2B sales mindset rather than a marketing mindset.
Control Your Narrative
If you do not actively tell your story, the market will tell it for you.
The reality is that most protocols' data cannot be perfect, and that’s okay. The real problem is: trying to hide it and remaining silent for months. The most common excuse I hear is, "I don’t want to get criticized on Twitter."
Projects do not die because they are mocked on Twitter, but they do die because they are forgotten by investors. The longer you go without communicating with the market, the angrier and more disappointed investors will become.
You do not need perfect data; what you need is honesty, context, and a coherent explanation of what is important, what is improving, and what still needs improvement.
This is the key to building trust; silence will only directly destroy trust.
Token Unlocking
Token issuers must respect the supply and demand relationship.
If you want to understand price movements, you only need to grasp this core factor of supply and demand. Many times, price management is more about tactical operations to match supply and demand than anything else.
The biggest mistake I have seen is that teams only start thinking about countermeasures 1 to 2 months before unlocking. In just 30 days, you have no time to fix a huge supply-demand imbalance.
Start planning at least 30 weeks in advance, ideally 40 to 50 weeks. You need time to connect with buyers, find demand support, and communicate with investors when you need to delay unlocking.
This is a trivial, unremarkable but extremely critical part of IR; give yourself enough time to handle it.
Data is Your Best Ally
Narrative is important. But by 2026, narratives without data support will be meaningless.
The best IR systems use data to make tokens easier to understand, compare, and evaluate. The data itself should be able to tell a complete story.
Data can come from multiple sources:
· Proprietary data from your own protocol
· On-chain market structure data
· Comparative data from competitors
· Real-world benchmark cases that help traditional investors understand crypto behavior
The last category is currently severely underestimated. Truly excellent investor communication does not just showcase internal dashboards; it helps investors understand the role your protocol plays in a larger context.
For example: if you operate a perpetual contract DEX and the dashboard shows last month's trading volume was $75 million. Is that good? Is it bad? Who should it be compared to? Should investors buy or sell?
I see that there is a lot of data in the current crypto industry, but almost no background information. Excellent teams do not just report numbers; they tell stories with numbers.
IR is Not a 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 earnings reports are no longer a CFO delivering a dry presentation to 60 sell-side analysts on Zoom, but rather have a live feel, interaction, and emotion like an NBA post-game interview.
I completely agree. We have 8 years of goal-oriented, data-driven marketing experience that combines offline and social media. IR should operate in the same way. The goal is not just to "notify the market," but to engage existing investors, deepen their confidence, and expand the pool of potential future token holders.
What will the future look like? Live earnings report days, CEOs connecting with industry guests, inviting major holders to share their insights... truly interacting with investors to acquire new holders.
Lower the Entry Cost for Potential Investors
Today, all liquidity funds must prove the rationale for their holdings to LPs. This means due diligence and investment reports.
If your protocol does not have publicly available data, research reports, or background information, you are forcing every potential investor to build their analysis framework from scratch.
You are artificially raising the cost of investing in you, resulting in fewer people willing to invest.
Lower their difficulty by continuously providing high-quality information: research reports, protocol data analysis, ecosystem progress, and third-party analysis. Make it easy for fund analysts to write reports and include your token in their portfolios.
Without Data Analysis, You Are Flying Blind
Even the top protocols in the crypto space have a surprisingly weak understanding of their investor structure. Basic behavioral analysis is almost nonexistent: How long do investors hold on average? Do they start hedging with perpetuals when the token launches?
On-chain data makes 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 already been permanently recorded by on-chain data. Embedding this analytical capability into the IR function of the protocol will provide a significant advantage: not only understanding existing holders but also accurately targeting the next batch of potential investors.
Transparency Expands Market Size
Most teams instinctively believe that less disclosure is safer, but the reality is quite the opposite.
Investors are already bearing the uncertainty of your token: unlocking, treasury spending, market-making agreements, non-standardized terms, etc. If you do not provide answers, the market will not ignore these issues but will fill in the gaps in the most pessimistic way.
The cost of insufficient transparency cannot be precisely calculated; you will never know how many investors have abandoned your token due to incomplete or unverifiable information. This cost is real.
Success Metrics
People easily measure the success of IR by token price. The problem is that price noise is too great, influenced by many factors that IR cannot control: macroeconomic conditions, liquidity, market sentiment, geopolitical conflicts, etc.
A more reasonable approach is to measure whether IR has improved the quality and breadth of the investor structure.
Here are several metrics worth tracking:
· Growth in the number of target investors actively following the token
· Growth in quality holders across various sub-markets, especially liquidity funds and strategic institutions
· Changes in holder concentration
· The number of investors converting from initial contact → active due diligence → holding
· The proportion of core holders aligned with the target holding period
· The frequency and quality of investor outreach throughout the year
· Growth in inquiries from active investors
· Increased visibility in target buyer channels
· Measured through direct communication and feedback: improvement in investors' understanding of your core logic
For liquidity funds, a practical judgment is: compared to a year ago, are there more investors who have formed a clear valuation framework for your token?
Not everyone must buy in now, but if more people understand how to view your token, know what milestones are important, and what prices are attractive, that is real progress.
The success of IR is not just about "did the price go up," but "have we expanded the potential holder base."
The Road Ahead
We are building in this direction because the current state of tokens is a survival-level challenge for the entire industry. A regrettable fact is that most tokens currently lack investment value. Jason and I sincerely hope to solve this problem, and years of experience have clarified the future direction for us.
Tokens should be more transparent and investor-friendly than stocks because they are built on crypto infrastructure. Project teams have a strong incentive to move in this direction because it will greatly expand the reachable market.
More importantly, the field of investor relations has not seen innovation for a long time. In our view, the future of IR is not a dull procedural task but vibrant, multimedia, highly interactive, and proactive. It needs to actively engage in offline interactions, spark discussions on social media, and tell compelling stories to attract new investors. This is the direction the industry must take.
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