Blockworks Co-Founder Michael Ippolito shares practical insights from a year of deep engagement with over 20 top crypto protocols, covering token unlock schedules, on-chain holder analysis, and innovations in earnings calls. He highlights the core issues causing most tokens to be “not worth investing in” and proposes an IR strategy framework that genuinely expands the buyer pool and improves holder quality. This article is adapted from Michael Ippolito’s piece “The Crypto-Native Guide to Investor Relations,” edited and translated by Dongqu.
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Table of Contents
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- Token price depends on two things
- Silence is the most dangerous move
- Unlock management: you need ten times more time than you think
- Data is not just dashboards, but a narrative
- Crypto IR doesn’t have to copy the boring stock market
- Lower the investment barrier: make due diligence easier
- On-chain data is the holy grail for market IR
- Transparency is protection, not a weakness
- Measure IR effectiveness: don’t just look at token price
The essence of Investor Relations (IR) is helping the market understand an asset: its strategy, potential, and why it’s worth holding. It’s the bridge between issuers and the market.
Over the past year, Blockworks Co-Founder Michael Ippolito has visited nearly all leading crypto protocols, helping them establish IR mechanisms. Currently, he works with over 20 projects. His conclusion is straightforward: “We are far from where we should be.”
Good IR can expand your potential buyer base and improve holder quality; poor or absent IR, regardless of product strength, leads to a single outcome: token price decline.
Token price depends on two things
To maximize a token’s market value, there are only two core variables: how many relevant investors know about your token, and among them, how many actually become buyers. A solid IR strategy must optimize both.
Potential crypto buyers generally fall into two categories.
The first is liquidity-focused crypto funds. These active managers either already hold your token or are tracking it. For them, the key is “re-pricing”: turning a fund that values you at $1 into one that sees a path to $5. Achieving this relies on clear data, persuasive storytelling, and consistent progress. It’s a combination of narrative and indicator management.
The second category is large strategic or institutional investors—think recent collaborations like Morpho x Apollo or BlackRock’s DeFi positions. This approach is entirely different—longer sales cycles, stricter due diligence, and often requiring a mature product to even start conversations.
If you’re still in early stages or urgently need short-term funding, this path may not be suitable. But if you’re ready, you need to go to their turf: Bloomberg terminals, institutional seminars, and face-to-face relationship building. This is B2B thinking, not marketing.
Silence is the most dangerous move
If you don’t proactively tell your story, the market will do it for you—and usually in a worse way.
The reality is, most protocols’ numbers are imperfect. That’s okay.
The real problem is trying to hide or remaining silent for months. Ippolito often hears, “I don’t want to get roasted on Twitter.”
But projects don’t die because of Twitter trolls; they die because investors forget about them. The longer you stay silent, the angrier and more disappointed your investors become.
You don’t need perfect metrics. You need honesty, context, and a clear explanation: what’s most important, what’s improving, and what still needs work. That’s how trust is built. Once you go silent, trust erodes.
Unlock management: you need ten times more time than you think
Token projects must prioritize supply and demand. If you want to understand your price movements, you only need to grasp these two dynamics. Managing token price is often more about tactically balancing these variables than anything else.
Ippolito sees the most common mistake as teams only starting to plan strategies one or two months before unlocks. You simply don’t have enough time to reverse large supply-demand imbalances in 30 days.
Minimum standard: start planning at least 30 weeks in advance, ideally 40 to 50 weeks. Finding buyers takes time; identifying supply absorbers takes time; if you need to delay unlocks, communicating with investors also takes time.
This is the most tedious, least glamorous, but absolutely necessary part of IR. Give yourself enough runway to handle it.
Data is not just dashboards, but a narrative
Storytelling is important, but in 2026, data without context is meaningless.
The best IR programs use data to make tokens easier to understand, compare, and value. Data should tell a story.
These data points can come from multiple layers: native protocol data, on-chain market structure data, competitor comparison data, and real-world analogies that make crypto-native behaviors readable to broader investors.
Today, this last layer is severely underestimated in crypto. Excellent IR communication isn’t just about showing your internal dashboards; it’s about helping investors understand your protocol’s place in a larger context.
For example: you’re doing IR for a perpetual contract DEX, and your dashboard shows $75 million in trading volume last month. Is that good? Bad? Who should investors compare it to? Should they rush in to buy or run away?
Ippolito observes: the entire crypto space is flooded with data, but almost no context. Top teams don’t just report numbers—they tell stories.
Crypto IR doesn’t have to copy the boring stock market
Most people think crypto IR will look like stock market IR. The problem is, stock IR is painfully dull.
Vlad Tenev, CEO of Robinhood, envisions IR that’s lively—more like NBA post-game interviews than a dry CFO presentation. Ippolito fully agrees.
Blockworks has 8 years of experience in goal-oriented marketing, combining data analysis, IRL events, and social media. IR should operate the same way. The goal isn’t just “inform the market,” but deepen existing investor conviction and expand the future investor base.
Specifically? Host “earnings days”! Live-stream your CEO and key guests. If Yano is on your holder list, bring him in, let him speak. Interact with investors as if they’re audience members, and attract new investors.
Lower the investment barrier: make due diligence easier
Every liquidity fund must justify its holdings to LPs. This means due diligence and investment reports. If there’s no data, research, or context about your protocol, you’re forcing potential investors to start from zero.
You’re literally raising the cost of investing in you, which results in fewer takers.
The simple solution: proactively release大量 high-quality information—research reports, protocol analyses, ecosystem updates, third-party evaluations. Make it easy for a fund analyst to write a memo recommending “adding this token to the portfolio.”
On-chain data is the holy grail for market IR
Even the most mature protocols in crypto often have surprisingly low understanding of their investors. Basic behavioral analysis is almost nonexistent—how long do investors hold on average? Did they hedge with perpetuals when your token launched?
On-chain data makes all this knowable—something stock IR teams can only dream of.
If an investor claims to be a long-term believer, the truth is already on the chain. Protocols that integrate on-chain analysis into IR will gain a huge advantage: better understanding of current holder structures and identifying who to target next.
Transparency is protection, not a weakness
Most teams instinctively think less disclosure is safer, but the reality is the opposite.
Investors are already pricing in various uncertainties about your token—unlock schedules, treasury spending, opaque market maker contracts, etc. If you don’t provide answers, the market won’t ignore these issues; it will fill in the gaps with unhelpful speculation.
The cost of insufficient transparency is hard to quantify—you never know how many investors give up because of incomplete or unverifiable info. But that cost is real.
Tools like Blockworks’ Token Transparency Framework (TTF) or DeFi Llama’s Token Rights page help standardize info presentation and reduce the administrative burden of repeatedly answering DD questions.
Measure IR effectiveness: don’t just look at token price
Using token price as a measure of IR success is tempting but dangerous. Price is influenced by many factors outside IR: macro environment, liquidity conditions, market sentiment, geopolitical conflicts.
A better metric is whether your IR has improved the quality and breadth of your investor base. Key indicators include: growth in active investors tracking your token, changes in high-quality holder distribution, the number of investors moving from initial contact to due diligence to actual holdings, annual investor touchpoints and their quality, and media coverage within your target buyer circles.
For liquidity funds, a practical question to ask regularly: are there more investors today who have a clear valuation framework for your token than a year ago? Not everyone needs to hold your token today, but if more right-fit investors understand your milestones and what price levels are attractive, that’s real progress.
Success isn’t “the token went up,” but “we’ve expanded and optimized the market that can hold our token.”
