Over the past year, Michael Ippolito, co-founder of Blockworks, has worked hands-on with 20+ top crypto protocols to build their investor relations (IR) functions. His blunt takeaway: most tokens are simply uninvestable, and the root cause is near-zero IR.
Effective IR can expand the potential buyer pool and improve holder quality. Poor or absent IR sends token prices into a downward spiral, no matter how strong the product.
Token Price Depends on Just Two Variables
Two core variables determine market value: how many relevant investors know your token exists, and how many of them become buyers. Buyers fall into two buckets. Liquidity crypto funds need data, narrative, and progress to reprice the token from $1 to $5. Large strategic or institutional investors demand longer sales cycles, stricter due diligence, and a mature product. The second group requires B2B sales, not marketing.
Silence Is the Most Dangerous Move
If you do not tell your story, the market will tell it for you — usually worse. Most protocols have imperfect numbers. That is fine. The real danger is trying to cover up or going silent for months. The common excuse is “I don‘t want to get roasted on Twitter.” But projects die not from Twitter trolls but from investors forgetting they exist. Once trust erodes, it’s hard to rebuild.
Unlock Management: Start Planning At Least 30 Weeks Ahead
Token price management is fundamentally about balancing supply and demand. The most common mistake: teams start thinking about unlocks just one or two weeks before the event. Ippolito insists on at least 30 weeks of lead time, ideally 40–50 weeks. Finding buyers, identifying supply absorbers, and communicating potential delays all take time. This is the least glamorous but most critical part of IR.
Data Is More Than Dashboards — It‘s a Narrative
By 2026, narratives without data are meaningless. The best IR uses data to make tokens easy to understand, compare, and value. Data can come from protocol metrics, on-chain market structure, competitor benchmarks, and “real-world analogies” that make crypto-native behavior readable. For example, a perpetual DEX reports $75 million monthly volume — is that good or bad? Without context, investors cannot decide.
Ippolito observes that crypto is full of data but nearly devoid of context. Great teams don’t just report numbers; they tell stories.
Crypto IR Doesn’t Have to Copy Boring Equities
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev envisions earnings calls as lively as NBA post-game interviews. Blockworks applies its 8-year experience in goal-oriented marketing, data analysis, and IRL events to IR. Concrete tactic: host “Investor Relations Days” with live-streamed conversations between the CEO and top token holders, turning investors into an engaged audience while attracting new buyers.
Lower the Due Diligence Barrier
Every liquidity fund must justify its holdings to LPs. If your protocol has no data, research, or context available, you are raising the cost of investing. The fix: proactively release high-quality information — research reports, protocol analyses, ecosystem updates, and third-party assessments — making it trivial for an analyst to write a “buy” memo.
On-Chain Data Is a Weapon Traditional IR Dreams Of
Most protocols barely understand who their investors are — average holding period, hedging behavior? On-chain data makes all this visible. Protocols that integrate on-chain analytics into IR gain a huge edge: they not only understand current holder composition but also identify which buyers to target next.
Transparency Protects, Not Weakens
Teams instinctively disclose less, but the opposite is true. Investors already price in uncertainty about unlocks, treasury spending, opaque market-maker contracts, etc. If you don’t provide answers, the market fills in blanks with the worst assumptions. Frameworks like Blockworks’ Token Transparency Framework (TTF) or DeFi Llama’s Token Rights page help standardize information and reduce the burden of repeated DD questions.
Measure IR Success Beyond Token Price
Price is influenced by macro, liquidity, sentiment, and geopolitics — too many external factors. Better metrics: growth in investor awareness, distribution of high-quality holders, conversion rates from first contact to holding, annual touchpoints, and media coverage among target buyers. Success is not “did the token go up?” but “did we expand and optimize the market that can hold us?”