Can't Sell Your Tokens? 90% of Crypto Projects Overlook Investor Relations

Written by: Mippo

Translated by: Chopper, Foresight News

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

When I first entered the crypto industry, the so-called “good IR” 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.

Doing IR well can expand your buyer base and improve the quality of your holder structure. Poorly executed or nonexistent IR, no matter how excellent your product or tokens are, will only lead to a continuous decline in value.

In the past year, we have built investor relations systems for nearly all top projects in the crypto space, 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, focus on two factors:

How many target investors are aware of your token’s existence

What proportion of these investors convert into buyers

An excellent IR strategy must optimize both.

There are essentially two types of potential token buyers:

First are 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 the path to $5. Achieving this requires precise data, clear storytelling, and ongoing progress evidence. This is about narrative building and data presentation.

The second type includes large strategic investors or institutions, such as 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 are in early stages or need quick funding, frankly, these institutions may not be suitable. But if you are ready, you should appear where they are: Bloomberg terminals, industry summits, and through offline relationship building. Use B2B sales thinking, not just marketing.

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. The real problem is trying to hide it 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 are mocked on Twitter, but they will die if investors forget about them. The longer you stay silent, the angrier and more disappointed investors become.

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

This is the key to building trust. Silence will only directly destroy it.

Token Unlocks

Token issuers must respect supply and demand dynamics.

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 starting to think about response strategies 1-2 months before unlocks. In just 30 days, there’s hardly enough time to fix a significant supply-demand imbalance.

Plan 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—be sure to give yourself enough time to handle it.

Data Is Your Best Ally

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

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

Data can come from multiple sources:

Proprietary data from your protocol

On-chain market structure data

Competitive comparison data

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

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

For example: you operate a perpetual contract DEX, and your dashboard shows $75 million in trading volume last month. 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 context. Top 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 quarterly 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. With 8 years of experience in goal-oriented, data-backed marketing that combines offline and social media, IR should operate the same way. Its goal isn’t just “inform the market,” but to attract existing investors, deepen their confidence, and expand the potential investor base.

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

Lower the Bar for Potential Investors

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

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

This artificially raises their cost of investing in you, reducing the number of willing investors.

Reduce their difficulty by continuously providing high-quality information: research reports, protocol data analysis, ecosystem progress, 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 investor structures. Basic behavioral analysis is almost nonexistent: How long do investors hold? Do they hedge at launch?

On-chain data makes deep analysis, coveted by stock IR teams, 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 fill in the gaps with worst-case assumptions.

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

Success Metrics

It’s easy to measure IR success by token price. The problem is, prices are noisy and influenced by many uncontrollable factors: macroeconomics, liquidity, market sentiment, geopolitical conflicts, etc.

A more reasonable approach is to measure 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

Increase in high-quality holders across segments, especially liquidity funds and strategic institutions

Changes in holder concentration

Number of investors transitioning from initial contact → due diligence → holding

Proportion of core holders aligned with your target holding cycle

Frequency and quality of investor outreach throughout the year

Growth in active investor inquiries

Increased exposure through direct communication and feedback: improved investor understanding of your core logic

For liquidity funds, a practical indicator is whether more investors now have a clear valuation framework for your token compared to a year ago.

Not everyone needs to buy now, but if more people understand how to evaluate your token, recognize key milestones, and see 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 toward this vision 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 sincerely want to solve this problem, and our years of experience have clarified the future direction.

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 greatly expands 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 procedural tasks but vibrant, multimedia, highly interactive, proactive engagement. It requires active offline outreach, sparking discussions on social media, and telling compelling stories to attract new investors. This is the industry’s inevitable path forward.