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 its potential value. It serves as a bridge between the project and the market.
When I first entered the crypto industry, the standard for a "good IR" was rather low. Over the years, while we have made some improvements in certain areas, we are still far from achieving the appropriate level of communication with investors.
If IR is done well, it can widen your buyer base and enhance the quality of your holder structure. If done poorly or not at all, no matter how excellent the product is, the token will just keep falling.
In the past year, we have built investor relations systems by communicating with almost all leading projects in the crypto space, currently providing services to over 20 projects. This article is a practical guide for investor communication that can be implemented directly.
Distribution is Key
If you want to maximize the value of your token, you only need to consider two factors:
· How many target investors know your token exists
· How many of those investors convert to buyers
A good IR strategy must optimize both of these aspects.
There are essentially two types of potential buyers for your token:
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 for it to rise to $5. You need to achieve this through precise data, clear narratives, and continuous progress indicators. This is the work of narrative building and data presentation.
The second type is large strategic investors or institutions. For example, recent collaborations between Morpho and Apollo, BlackRock and 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 funds in the short term, frankly, these types of institutions may not be suitable for you. But if you are ready, you should appear where they are: Bloomberg terminals, institutional summits, and building relationships offline. You need to adopt B2B sales thinking, not marketing thinking.
Control Your Narrative
If you do not proactively tell your own story, the market will tell it for you.
The reality is that most protocols' data can’t be perfect, and that’s okay. The real problem is: attempting to conceal and remaining silent for months. The excuse I hear most often is: "I don't want to be criticized on Twitter."
Projects won't die from being mocked on Twitter, but they will die from being forgotten by investors. The longer you go without communicating with the market, the angrier and more disappointed investors will become.
You don't need perfect data; you need honesty, context, and coherent explanations of what’s important, what’s improving, and what still needs to improve.
This is the key to building trust; silence will only directly destroy trust.
Token Unlocking
Token issuers must respect supply and demand relationships.
If you want to understand price movements, just grasp this core factor of supply and demand. Often, price management resembles tactical operations that match supply and demand, rather than anything else.
The biggest mistake I have seen is teams starting to think about solutions only 1 to 2 months before unlocking. In just 30 days, you won’t have enough time to rectify significant supply-demand imbalances.
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 postpone unlocking.
This is a trivial, unglamorous, yet extremely critical part of IR; give yourself enough of a time window to handle it.
Data is Your Best Ally
Narrative matters. 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 undervalued. Truly excellent investor communication doesn’t just showcase internal dashboards; it helps investors understand the role your protocol plays within a larger context.
For example: if you operate a perpetual contract DEX and the panel shows a trading volume of $75 million last month. Is this good? Is it bad? Who should it be compared to? Should investors buy or run?
I see a ton of data in the current crypto industry, but almost no background information. Great teams don’t just report numbers; they tell stories with numbers.
IR is Not a Compliance Task
Most people think the investor relations in the crypto industry is like that in the stock market. The only difference is: IR in the stock market is very dry.
Don’t believe it? Listen to Vlad Tenev’s thoughts.
The future Vlad envisions: earnings calls will no longer be dry speeches from CFOs to 60 sell-side analysts on Zoom, but will have a sense of presence, interaction, and emotion like an NBA post-game interview.
I completely agree. We have 8 years of goal-driven, data-supported, integrated marketing experience offline and through social media. IR should operate in the same way. The goal is not just to "inform the market," but to attract existing investors, deepen their confidence, and expand the pool of potential future token holders.
What will the future look like? Live streams on earnings day, CEOs connecting with industry guests, inviting significant holders to share... genuinely interacting with investors to gain new holders.
Lower the Entry Costs for Potential Investors
All liquidity funds now must prove the rationale behind their holdings to LPs. This means due diligence, which means investment reports.
If your protocol lacks public data, research reports, and 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, and the result is: the number of people willing to invest in you will decrease.
Reduce their difficulty, continuously output high-quality information: research reports, protocol data analysis, ecosystem progress, third-party analysis. Ensure that fund analysts can easily write reports, incorporating your token into their portfolios.
Without Data Analysis, You're Flying Blind
Even the top protocols in the crypto space have shockingly weak understandings of their investor structures. Basic behavioral analysis is nearly nonexistent: how long do investors typically hold? Do they start hedging with perpetual contracts when the token goes live?
On-chain data allows for the deep analyses that stock market IR teams dream of.
If an investor claims to be a long-term believer, the truth has already been permanently recorded by on-chain data. Integrating this analytical capability into the IR functions of a protocol will provide a significant advantage: not only understanding existing holders but also accurately targeting the next group of potential investors.
Transparency Expands Market Size
Most teams instinctively believe that less disclosure equals more safety, but the reality is quite the opposite.
Investors are already bearing the uncertainty of your token: unlocking, treasury expenditures, market-making agreements, unstandardized terms, etc. If you do not provide answers, the market will not overlook these issues; instead, it will fill in the blanks 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 often easily measure the success of IR by the token price. The problem is that price noise is too high, influenced by numerous factors that IR cannot control: macroeconomic conditions, liquidity, market sentiment, geopolitical conflicts, and so on.
A more reasonable approach is to measure whether IR has improved the quality and breadth of the investor structure.
Here are a few metrics worth tracking:
· Increase in the number of target investors actively interested in the token
· Growth of quality holders in various sub-segments, especially liquidity funds and strategic institutions
· Changes in holder concentration
· Investor conversion numbers from initial contact → active due diligence → holding
· The percentage of core holders aligned with target holding periods
· Frequency and quality of investor outreach throughout the year
· Increase in active investor inquiries
· Increased exposure within target buyer channels
· Measuring through direct communication and feedback: investors' understanding of your core logic improves
For liquidity funds, a very practical judgment is: compared to a year ago, have more investors developed a clear valuation framework for your token?
Not everyone has to buy now, but if more people understand how to view your token, know which milestones are important, and what price is 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 Path Forward
We are building in this direction because the current state of tokens presents a survival-level challenge for the entire industry. A regrettable fact is that most tokens currently do not possess investment value. Jason and I sincerely hope to address this issue, and our years of experience have clarified the direction for the future.
Tokens should be more transparent and investor-friendly than stocks because they are built on a crypto infrastructure. Project teams have a strong incentive to move in this direction because it greatly expands the addressable market.
More importantly, the field of investor relations has not seen innovation for quite a while. In our view, the future of IR is not a dry procedural task but lively, multimedia, highly interactive, and proactive. It requires actively engaging in offline interaction, stirring discussions on social media, and telling compelling stories to attract new investors. This is the direction the industry must take.
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