Tokens Not Selling? 90% of Crypto Projects Overlook Investor Relations
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Tokens Not Selling? 90% of Crypto Projects Overlook Investor Relations
An Investor Relations Best Practices Guide for Crypto Projects
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsBy Mippo
Translated by Chopper, Foresight News
The core function of an Investor Relations (IR) department is to help the market understand an asset—its strategy and its potential value. It serves as the bridge between the project team and the market.
When I first entered the crypto industry, “good IR” was largely seen as a box-ticking exercise. While we’ve made progress in certain areas over the years, our approach to communicating with investors remains far below where it should be.
Well-executed IR broadens your buyer base and improves holder quality. Poor or non-existent IR—even for an exceptional product—will inevitably send the token price downward.
Over the past year, we’ve collaborated with nearly all top-tier crypto projects to build IR frameworks, and currently serve more than 20 projects. This article is a practical, actionable guide to investor communications.
Distribution Is King
To maximize token value, focus on just two factors:
- How many target investors know your token exists
- How many of those investors convert into buyers
A strong IR strategy must optimize both.
Token buyers fall into two fundamental categories:
First are crypto liquidity funds—actively managed institutions that either already hold your token or are continuously tracking it. For them, the core objective is value re-rating: convincing a firm valuing your token at $1 to see a credible path to $5. This requires precise data, clear narrative framing, and consistent proof of progress—essentially, narrative construction and data presentation.
Second are large strategic or institutional investors—for example, recent partnerships like Morpho with Apollo or BlackRock with Uniswap. This operates under a completely different logic: longer sales cycles, deeper due diligence, and the requirement for a mature product. If you’re early-stage or need capital quickly, frankly, these institutions aren’t right for you. But if you’re ready, you must show up where they are: Bloomberg terminals, institutional conferences, and through offline relationship-building. Apply B2B sales thinking—not marketing thinking.
Own Your Narrative
If you don’t tell your story proactively, the market will tell it for you.
The reality is, most protocols’ data will never be perfect—and that’s fine. What’s truly problematic is attempting to conceal information or remaining silent for months. The most common excuse I hear is: “I don’t want to get roasted on Twitter.”
Projects don’t die from being mocked on Twitter—but they do die from being forgotten by investors. The longer you stay silent, the angrier and more disillusioned investors become.
You don’t need perfect data—you need honesty, context, and a coherent explanation of what matters, what’s improving, and what still needs work.
That’s how trust is built. Silence destroys it instantly.
Token Unlock Management
Token issuers must respect supply-demand dynamics.
To understand price movement, focus solely on this core driver. Often, price management is less about speculation and more about tactical supply-demand alignment.
The biggest mistake I’ve seen is teams waiting until just one to two months before an unlock to begin planning their response. In 30 days, you simply cannot fix a massive supply-demand imbalance.
Start planning at least 30 weeks in advance—ideally 40–50 weeks. You need time to connect with buyers, identify demand absorption channels, and communicate with investors if delays are necessary.
This is the unglamorous, often-overlooked but absolutely critical part of IR—give yourself enough runway to handle it properly.
Data Is Your Best Ally
Narrative matters—but in 2026, a narrative without data support is meaningless.
The best IR programs 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 protocol data
- On-chain market structure data
- Cross-comparative benchmarking against competitors
- Real-world analogs that help traditional investors interpret crypto-native behavior
The last category is severely underutilized today. Truly excellent investor communication goes beyond internal dashboards—it helps investors understand your protocol’s role within the broader ecosystem.
Example: You operate a perpetuals DEX, and your dashboard shows $75 million in monthly trading volume. Is that good or bad? Against whom should it be compared? Should investors buy—or run?
Today’s crypto industry is awash in data—but starved of context. Top-tier teams don’t just report numbers; they use numbers to tell stories.
IR Is Not a Compliance Checklist
Most people assume crypto IR works the same way as public equities IR—the only difference being that equity IR is incredibly dull.
Don’t believe me? Listen to Vlad Tenev’s vision.
Vlad envisions a future where earnings calls aren’t dry Zoom presentations by CFOs to 60 sell-side analysts—but instead resemble NBA post-game interviews: live, interactive, emotionally resonant.
I fully agree. We bring eight years of goal-oriented, data-driven, omnichannel marketing experience—blending offline engagement and social media. IR should operate the same way. Its goal isn’t just to “inform the market,” but to engage existing investors, deepen their confidence, and expand the pool of future token holders.
What does that future look like? Live earnings-day streams, CEO interviews with industry guests, spotlights featuring major holders sharing their conviction—genuine interaction to acquire new holders.
Lower the Barrier to Entry for Potential Investors
Every liquidity fund today must justify holdings to its LPs. That means due diligence—and investment reports.
If your protocol lacks publicly available data, research reports, or background context, you’re forcing every prospective investor to build their analytical framework from scratch.
You’re artificially inflating the cost of investing in you—so fewer people will choose to do so.
Reduce friction by consistently delivering high-quality information: research reports, protocol analytics, ecosystem updates, third-party analysis. Empower fund analysts to write reports easily—and include your token in their portfolios.
Without Data Analysis, You’re Flying Blind
Even the most elite crypto protocols possess shockingly weak understanding of their investor composition. Foundational behavioral analysis is virtually nonexistent: How long do investors hold on average? Do they open perpetual hedges immediately upon listing?
On-chain data makes possible the kind of deep analysis that equity IR teams can only dream of.
If an investor claims to be a long-term believer, the truth is permanently recorded on-chain. Protocols embedding this analytical capability into IR gain a massive edge—not only understanding current holders, but precisely identifying the next cohort of target investors.
Transparency Expands Market Size
Most teams instinctively believe “less disclosure = more safety”—but the opposite is true.
Investors are already bearing uncertainty around your token: unlocks, treasury spending, market-making agreements, non-standard terms. If you don’t provide answers, the market won’t ignore these questions—it’ll fill in the blanks with the most pessimistic assumptions.
The cost of insufficient transparency is incalculable—you’ll never know how many investors walked away because information was incomplete or hard to verify. That cost is very real.
Success Metrics
It’s tempting to measure IR success solely by token price. But price is too noisy—driven by countless factors outside IR’s control: macro conditions, liquidity, market sentiment, geopolitical conflict, etc.
A more meaningful measure is whether IR has improved the quality and breadth of your investor base.
Here are key metrics worth tracking:
- Growth in number of target investors actively tracking the token
- Growth in high-quality holders across key segments—especially liquidity funds and strategic institutions
- Changes in holder concentration
- Number of investors converting from initial contact → active due diligence → actual holding
- Proportion of core holders whose intended holding period aligns with your target horizon
- Frequency and quality of investor outreach over the year
- Growth in unsolicited investor inquiries
- Increased visibility in target buyer channels
- Improvement in investors’ understanding of your core thesis—measured via direct feedback and conversations
For liquidity funds, a highly practical litmus test is: Compared to a year ago, have more investors formed a clear valuation framework for your token?
Not everyone needs to buy now—but if more people understand how to think about your token, which milestones matter, and what price points are compelling—that’s real progress.
IR success isn’t just “Did the price go up?” It’s “Did we meaningfully expand the universe of potential holders?”
The Road Ahead
We’re building toward this future—because the current state of tokens is an existential challenge for the entire industry. A sobering fact: Most tokens today lack genuine investment merit. Jason and I are deeply committed to solving this—and years of hands-on experience have clarified the path forward.
Tokens should be more transparent and investor-friendly than stocks—precisely because they’re built on cryptographic infrastructure. Project teams have strong incentives to move in this direction, as it dramatically expands addressable markets.
More importantly, investor relations has seen little innovation for decades. In our view, IR’s future is not dry process work—it’s dynamic, multimedia, highly interactive, and proactive. It demands active offline engagement, sparking discussions on social media, and telling compelling stories to attract new investors. This is the direction the industry must take.
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