Tokens not selling? 90% of crypto projects overlook investor relations.

Author: Mippo

Compiler: Chopper, Foresight News

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

When I first entered the crypto industry, what everyone considered a “good IR” was actually just average. Although we have made some improvements over the years, we still have a long way to go in how we communicate with investors.

A well-executed IR can widen your buyer base and improve the quality of the holder structure. If done poorly, or not done at all, no matter how excellent the product is, the token will only continue to decline.

In the past year, we have communicated with almost all major projects in the crypto space to build investor relations systems and are currently providing services for over 20 projects. This article serves as a practical guide for investor communication.

Distribution is key

If you want to maximize the value of your token, you only need to consider two factors:

· How many target investors are aware of your token’s existence · How many of those investors convert into buyers

An excellent IR strategy must optimize both of these aspects simultaneously.

Potential buyers of the token essentially fall into two categories:

The first category is crypto liquidity funds. They are actively managed institutions that either already hold your token or are continuously tracking it. For them, the core is value re-evaluation, 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 involves narrative building and data presentation.

The second category is large strategic investors or institutions. For example, the 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’re in the early stages or need funding in the short term, frankly speaking, these institutions may not be suitable for you. But if you are ready, you should appear in their spaces: Bloomberg terminals, institutional summits, and through offline networking. You need to apply B2B sales thinking, not marketing thinking.

Control your narrative

If you don’t actively tell your story well, the market will tell it for you.

The reality is that most protocols’ data can’t be perfect, and that’s okay. The real issue is attempting to conceal it and remaining silent for months. The most common excuse I hear is: “I don’t want to be ridiculed on Twitter.”

Projects won’t die because they are mocked on Twitter, but they will 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 don’t need perfect data; what you need is honesty, background explanations, and coherent explanations 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 supply and demand relationships.

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

The biggest mistake I’ve seen is teams only starting to think about countermeasures 1-2 months before the unlocking. In just 30 days, you simply don’t have 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 to absorb, and communicate with investors when you need to delay unlocking.

This is a trivial, inconspicuous part of IR, but extremely critical; give yourself enough time to handle it.

Data is your best ally

Narrative is important. But by 2026, a narrative without data support is meaningless.

The best IR systems make the token easier to understand, compare, and evaluate through data. The data itself should tell a complete story.

Data can come from multiple sources:

· Proprietary data from the protocol itself · On-chain market structure data · Comparative data with competitors · Real-world benchmark cases that help traditional investors understand crypto behavior

The last category is currently severely underrated. Truly excellent investor communication doesn’t 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? Bad? Who should it be compared to? Should investors buy or sell?

I see a lot of data in the current crypto industry, yet almost no background information. Excellent teams don’t just report numbers; they tell stories with numbers.

IR is not a compliance task that follows procedures

Most people think that investor relations in the crypto industry is the same as in the stock market. The only difference is that IR in the stock market is very dry.

Don’t believe it? Listen to Vlad Tenev’s perspective.

Vlad envisions a future where earnings reports aren’t just the CFO giving a dull presentation to 60 sell-side analysts on Zoom, but instead feel live, interactive, and emotional, 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 streams on earnings report day, CEOs connecting with industry guests, inviting major holders to share their insights… truly interacting with investors to gain new holders.

Lowering the entry cost for potential investors

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

If your protocol lacks publicly available data, research reports, and background information, you are forcing every potential investor to build an analytical framework from scratch.

You are artificially raising the cost of investing in you, resulting in fewer people willing to invest.

Reduce their difficulty by continuously providing high-quality information: research reports, protocol data analysis, ecosystem progress, third-party analysis. This allows fund analysts to easily 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 remarkably weak understanding of their investor structure. Basic behavioral analysis is almost nonexistent: How long do investors typically hold? Do they hedge with perpetual contracts when the token goes live?

On-chain data enables the deep analysis 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 function of a protocol provides 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 the less they disclose, the safer they are, but the reality is quite the opposite.

Investors are already bearing the uncertainty related to your token: unlocking, treasury expenditures, market-making agreements, non-standard clauses, etc. If you don’t provide answers, the market won’t overlook these issues but will speculate in the most pessimistic way.

The cost of insufficient transparency cannot be accurately calculated; you will never know how many investors abandon 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 significant, influenced by numerous factors beyond IR 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 in various market segments, 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 aligning with target holding periods · Frequency and quality of investor outreach throughout the year · Growth in proactive investor inquiries · Increased visibility in target buyer channels · Measuring 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 right now, but if more people understand how to view your token and know which milestones are important and what prices are attractive, that is real progress.

The success of IR is not just “did the price go up,” but “did we expand the potential holder base.”

The road ahead

We are building in this direction because the current state of tokens represents 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 address this issue, and our 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 parties have a strong incentive to move in this direction, as it will greatly expand the reachable market.

More importantly, the field of investor relations has seen little innovation for a long time. In our view, the future of IR is not a dull procedural task but rather lively, multimedia, highly interactive, and proactive. It requires actively engaging in offline interactions, sparking discussions on social media, and telling captivating stories to attract new investors. This is the direction the industry must take.