Tokens Not Moving? 90% of Crypto Projects Overlook Investor Relations

#震荡行情交易策略
The core responsibility of the Investor Relations (IR) department is to help the market understand an asset, its strategy, and potential value. It serves as a bridge between the project team and the market.
When I first entered the crypto industry, the so-called "good IR" in everyone's eyes was actually just so-so. 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, will only lead to your tokens declining steadily.
Over the past year, we’ve built investor relations systems for nearly all top projects in the crypto space, serving over 20 projects. This article is a practical, actionable guide to investor communication.
Distribution Is Key
If you want to maximize token value, just focus on two factors:
· How many target investors are aware of your token
· Among these investors, how many convert into buyers
An excellent IR strategy must optimize both.
There are essentially two types of potential token buyers:
The first type is 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 seeing it rise to $5. Achieving this requires precise data, clear storytelling, and ongoing progress proof. This is about narrative building and data presentation.
The second type is 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 are in early stages or need funding in the short term, frankly, these institutions may not be suitable for you. But if you are ready, you should appear where they are: Bloomberg terminals, industry summits, and through offline networking. Use B2B sales thinking, not marketing.
Control Your Narrative
If you don’t proactively tell your story well, the market will do it for you.
The reality is, most protocol data can’t be perfect, and that’s okay. What’s truly problematic 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 because investors forget about them. The longer you avoid communication, the angrier and more 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 will only directly destroy it.
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 starting to think about response plans 1-2 months before unlocks. In just 30 days, there’s hardly enough time to fix a huge 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 extremely critical part of IR—give yourself enough time to handle it properly.
Data Is Your Best Ally
Storytelling is important. But by 2026, stories without data support 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 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 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 data points in the current crypto industry, 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 that investor relations in crypto is like in the stock market. The only problem is: IR in stocks 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, and 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. The goal isn’t just to "inform the market," but to attract existing investors, deepen their confidence, and expand the potential investor base for future tokens.
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 and attracting 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 and research reports.
If your protocol doesn’t publish data, research, or background info, you’re forcing potential investors to build their analysis framework from scratch.
You artificially raise their investment costs, which results in fewer willing investors.
Reduce their difficulty by consistently 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 top protocols in crypto have surprisingly weak understanding of investor structures. Basic behavioral analysis is almost nonexistent: How long do investors hold? Do they hedge with perpetuals 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 your protocol 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 the most pessimistic 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, and more.
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
· Growth of quality holders in each segment, especially liquidity funds and strategic institutions
· Changes in holder concentration
· Conversion from initial contact → active due diligence → holding investors
· The 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 in target buyer channels
· Feedback-based understanding: improvement in investors’ comprehension of your core logic
For liquidity funds, a practical measure is whether more investors have formed 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 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 because it greatly expands accessible markets.
More importantly, the investor relations field has gone long without innovation. In our view, the future of IR is not dull procedural tasks but vibrant, multimedia, highly interactive, proactive engagement. It requires active offline interactions, sparking discussions on social media, and telling compelling stories to attract new investors. This is the industry’s inevitable path forward. #美伊对停火谈判各执一词 $BTC ‌$ETH ‌