The Real Reason Tokens Aren't Selling: 90% of Crypto Projects Ignore Investor Relations

Original Title: The Crypto Native Guide to Investor Relations

Original Author: Mippo, Blockworks Co-Founder

Original Compilation: Chopper, Foresight News

Investor Relations (IR) is primarily responsible for helping the market understand an asset, its strategy, and potential value. It acts as a bridge between project teams and the market.

When I first entered the crypto industry, the so-called “good IR” in people’s eyes was actually quite basic. Over the years, we’ve made some progress in certain areas, but in how we communicate with investors, we are still far from where we should be.

Good IR can expand your buyer base and improve the quality of your holder structure. Poor IR, or no IR at all, will cause your token to decline regardless of how good the product is.

In the past year, we’ve built investor relations systems for nearly all top projects in crypto, serving over 20 projects. This article is a practical, actionable guide for investor communication.

Distribution is Key

If you want to maximize your token’s value, just focus on two factors:

· How many target investors are aware of your token

· How many of those investors convert into buyers

An effective IR strategy must optimize both.

There are essentially two types of potential token buyers:

First, crypto liquidity funds. They are active management institutions that already hold your tokens or are continuously tracking them. For them, the core is re-evaluating value—showing an institution that values your token at $1 how it could rise to $5. Achieving this requires precise data, clear storytelling, and ongoing progress to prove it. This is about narrative building and data presentation.

Second, large strategic investors or institutions. Examples include recent collaborations like Morpho with Apollo, or 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’re in early stages or need quick funding, frankly, these institutions may not be suitable. But if you’re ready, you should appear where they are: Bloomberg terminals, industry summits, and through offline networking. Use B2B sales thinking, not marketing tactics.

Control Your Narrative

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

The reality is, most protocols’ data can’t be perfect, and that’s okay. What’s truly problematic is trying to hide things or remaining silent for months. The most common excuse I hear is: “I don’t want to get criticized on Twitter.”

Projects won’t die because they’re mocked on Twitter, but they can die from being forgotten by investors. The longer you stay silent, the more angry and disappointed investors become.

You don’t need perfect data; you need honesty, background explanations, and coherent updates on what’s important, what’s being improved, and what still needs work.

That’s the key to building trust. Silence only destroys trust directly.

Token Unlocks

Token issuers must respect the laws of supply and demand.

If you want to understand price movements, you only need to grasp this core factor: supply and demand. Often, price management is more about tactical matching of supply and demand than anything else.

The biggest mistake I’ve seen is teams only start planning 1–2 months before unlocks. In just 30 days, there’s hardly enough time to fix a significant supply-demand imbalance.

Start planning at least 30 weeks in advance, ideally 40–50 weeks. You need time to connect with buyers, find demand, and communicate with investors when delays are necessary.

This is a small but crucial part of IR—details that require ample lead time. Give yourself enough time to handle it properly.

Data Is Your Best Ally

Storytelling is important. But by 2026, narratives without data will be meaningless.

The best IR systems use data to make tokens easier to understand, compare, and evaluate. Data itself should tell a complete story.

Data can come from multiple sources:

· Proprietary data from your protocol

· On-chain market structure data

· Cross-competitor comparison data

· Real-world case studies that help traditional investors understand crypto behaviors

The last category is currently severely underestimated. Truly excellent investor communication isn’t just about showing internal dashboards; it’s about helping investors understand your protocol’s role in the bigger picture.

For example: You run a perpetual contract DEX with a monthly trading volume of $75 million. Is that good? Bad? Who should you compare it to? Should investors buy or run?

I see many projects in crypto with abundant data but almost no background information. Great teams don’t just report numbers—they tell stories with data.

IR Is Not Just a Compliance Routine

Most people think crypto IR is like stock market IR. The only problem is: stock IR is very dull.

Not convinced? Listen to Vlad Tenev’s perspective.

Vlad envisions a future where financial reports are no longer dry Zoom presentations by CFOs to 60 sell-side analysts, but instead feel like NBA post-game interviews—live, interactive, emotional.

I completely agree. We have 8 years of experience in goal-oriented, data-backed marketing that combines offline and social media. IR should operate the same way. The goal isn’t just “inform the market,” but to attract existing investors, deepen their confidence, and expand the potential investor base for future holdings.

What will the future look like? Live streams on earnings days, CEOs and industry guests joining calls, inviting major holders to share their insights… Truly engaging with investors to attract new holders.

Lower the Barriers for Potential Investors

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

If your protocol doesn’t publish data, research reports, or background info, you’re forcing potential investors to build analysis frameworks from scratch.

You’re artificially raising their cost of investing in you, which results in fewer willing investors.

Reduce their difficulty by consistently providing high-quality information: research reports, protocol data analysis, ecosystem updates, third-party analyses. Make it easy for fund analysts to write reports and include your token in their portfolios.

Without Data Analysis, You’re Flying Blind

Even the most top-tier protocols in crypto have surprisingly weak understanding of their investor base. Basic behavioral analysis is almost nonexistent: How long do investors hold? Do they hedge with perpetuals at launch?

On-chain data makes deep analysis, like that in stock IR teams dream of, possible.

If an investor claims to be a long-term believer, the truth is already permanently recorded on-chain. Embedding this analytical capability into your IR functions gives you a huge advantage: not only understanding current holders but also precisely targeting the next wave of potential investors.

Transparency Expands Market Size

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

Investors are already bearing uncertainty: unlocks, treasury spending, market-making protocols, non-standardized terms, etc. If you don’t provide answers, the market won’t ignore these issues—it will imagine the worst.

The cost of insufficient transparency is impossible to quantify; you’ll never know how many investors abandon your token due to incomplete or unverifiable information. That cost is real.

Success Metrics

People often measure IR success by token price. The problem is: prices are noisy and influenced by many factors beyond IR control—macro conditions, liquidity, market sentiment, geopolitical conflicts, etc.

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

Here are some key metrics to track:

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

· Growth of quality holders in specific segments, especially liquidity funds and strategic institutions

· Changes in holder concentration

· Conversion from initial contact → due diligence → holding

· The proportion of core holders aligned with your target holding cycle

· Frequency and quality of investor outreach throughout the year

· Growth in proactive investor inquiries

· Increased exposure in target buyer channels

· Feedback from direct communication: improved understanding of your core logic

For liquidity funds, a practical indicator is: compared to a year ago, are more investors forming clear valuation frameworks for your token?

Not everyone needs to buy now, but if more understand how to evaluate your token, know which milestones matter, and recognize attractive prices, that’s real progress.

IR success isn’t just “price went up,” but “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 sad fact is: most tokens today lack true investment value. Jason and I genuinely want to solve this, and our years of experience have clarified the future path.

Tokens should be more transparent and investor-friendly than stocks because they are built on crypto infrastructure. Projects are highly motivated to move in this direction, as it will greatly expand accessible markets.

More importantly, the field of investor relations has been stagnant for a long time. In our view, the future of IR isn’t dull compliance tasks but vibrant, multimedia, highly interactive, proactive outreach. It requires active offline engagement, sparking discussions on social media, and telling compelling stories to attract new investors. This is the industry’s inevitable direction.