The core responsibility of an investor relations (IR) department is to help the market understand an asset, its strategy, and its potential value. It acts as a bridge between the project and the market. When I first entered the crypto industry, what people considered "good IR" was just so-so. While we have made progress in some areas over the years, we are still far from reaching the proper level in our communication with investors. Good IR can broaden your buyer base and improve the quality of your holder structure. Poor IR, or even no IR at all, will only lead to a continuous decline in token value, no matter how excellent the product. Over the past year, we have communicated with almost all the leading projects in the crypto space to build investor relations systems, and we currently provide services to more than 20 projects. This article is a practical guide to investor communication that can be directly implemented. Distribution is key. If you want to maximize your token's value, you only need to look at two factors: how many target investors know your token exists, and how many of those investors become buyers. An excellent IR strategy must optimize both of these aspects simultaneously. There are essentially only two types of potential buyers for a token: the first is crypto liquidity funds. These are actively managed institutions that already hold your token or are continuously tracking it. For them, the core is value reassessment—seeing an institution that values your token at $1 see a path to $5. This requires precise data, a clear narrative, and consistent proof of progress. 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 and BlackRock with Uniswap. This operates on a completely different logic: longer sales cycles, more rigorous due diligence, and you need a mature product. If you're in an early stage or need funding in the short term, frankly, these institutions aren't for you. But if you're ready, you should be where they are: Bloomberg Terminal, institutional summits, and building networks offline. Use a B2B sales mindset, not a marketing mindset. Control your narrative. If you don't actively tell your story, the market will tell it for you. The reality is, most protocols' data won't be perfect, and that's okay. What's really problematic is trying to hide things and remaining silent for months. The excuse I hear most often is, "I don't want to get flamed on Twitter." A project won't die from being ridiculed on Twitter, but it will die from being forgotten by investors. The longer you don't communicate with the market, the angrier and more disappointed investors will become.You don't need perfect data; you need honesty, background information, and a coherent explanation of what's important, what's being improved, and what still needs improvement. This is key to building trust; silence will only destroy it. Token unlocking. Token issuers must respect supply and demand. If you want to understand price movements, you only need to understand this core factor. Often, price management is more like a tactical operation to match supply and demand than anything else. The biggest mistake I've seen is teams not starting to think about solutions until 1-2 months before unlocking. In just 30 days, you simply don't have 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 buyers to meet demand, and communicate with investors if you need to postpone unlocking. This is the seemingly trivial but crucial part of IR; give yourself enough time to handle it. Data is your best ally. Narrative is important, but in 2026, a narrative without data is meaningless. The best IR systems use data to make tokens easier to understand, compare, and evaluate. 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, and real-world benchmarks that allow traditional investors to understand crypto behavior. This last category is currently severely undervalued. Truly excellent investor communication goes beyond simply showcasing internal dashboards; it helps investors understand the role your protocol plays in the larger context. For example, you operate a perpetual contract DEX, and the dashboard shows $75 million in trading volume last month. Is that good? Is it bad? Who should it be compared to? Should investors buy or sell? I see a lot of data in the crypto industry right now, but almost no contextual information. Excellent teams don't just report numbers; they tell stories with numbers. IR is not just a compliance task. Most people think investor relations in the crypto industry are the same as in the stock market. The only problem is: IR in the stock market is incredibly boring. Vlad envisions a future where financial reports are no longer dry speeches by CFOs to 60 sell-side analysts on Zoom, but rather like post-NBA interviews—lively, interactive, and emotional. I completely agree. We have eight years of experience in goal-oriented, data-driven marketing that combines offline and social media. IR should operate in the same way. The goal is not just to "inform the market," but to attract existing investors, deepen their confidence, and expand the pool of potential future token holders. What will the future look like?Live earnings broadcasts, CEO-in-charge interactions with industry guests, and invitations for prominent holders to share their insights… these initiatives truly engage with investors and acquire new holders, lowering the entry cost for potential investors. Currently, all liquidity funds must justify their holdings to limited partners (LPs). This means due diligence and investment reports. If your protocol lacks publicly available data, research reports, and background information, you're forcing every potential investor to build their analytical framework from scratch. You're artificially raising the cost of investing in your token, resulting in fewer people willing to invest. Reduce the difficulty for them by consistently delivering high-quality information: research reports, protocol data analysis, ecosystem progress updates, and third-party analysis. Make it easy for fund analysts to write reports and include your token in their portfolios. Without data analysis, you're flying blindly. Even the top crypto protocols have a surprisingly weak understanding of investor structure. Basic behavioral analysis is almost nonexistent: How long do investors typically hold their tokens? Did they open perpetual hedging upon token launch? On-chain data makes the in-depth analysis that stock market IR teams dream of possible. If an investor claims to be a long-term believer, the truth has already been permanently recorded in on-chain data. Protocols that embed this analytical capability into their IR (Investment Relations) functions have a significant advantage: they can not only understand existing holders but also precisely target the next wave of potential investors. Transparency expands market reach. Most teams instinctively believe that less disclosure is safer, but the opposite is true. Investors already bear uncertainty for your token: unlocking, 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 in its own mind with the most pessimistic assumptions. The cost of insufficient transparency is immeasurable; you'll never know how many investors abandon your token due to incomplete or unverifiable information. This cost is real. Success metrics. It's easy to measure the success or failure of IR by token price. The problem is that price noise is too great, influenced by many factors beyond the control of IR: macroeconomics, liquidity, market sentiment, geopolitical conflicts, etc. A more reasonable approach is to measure whether IR improves the quality and breadth of the investor base.Here are some metrics worth tracking: growth in the number of target investors actively following the token; growth in high-quality holders across various market segments, especially liquidity funds and strategic institutions; changes in holder concentration; the number of investors who convert from initial contact to active due diligence to holding; the proportion of core holders with the target holding period; the frequency and quality of investor outreach throughout the year; growth in active investor inquiries; increased exposure in target buyer channels; and, measured through direct communication and feedback: improved investor understanding of your core logic. For liquidity funds, a very practical metric is whether more investors have developed a clear valuation framework for your token compared to a year ago. Not everyone has to buy now, but if more people understand how to view your token, know which milestones are important, and what prices are attractive, that's real progress. Successful IR isn't just about "whether the price has gone up," but about "whether we've expanded our potential holder base." The road ahead. We are building in this direction because the current state of tokens is a survival challenge for the entire industry. A regrettable fact is that most tokens currently lack investment value. Jason and I genuinely want to address this issue, and years of experience have given us a clearer picture of the future. Tokens should be more transparent and investor-friendly than stocks because they are built on crypto infrastructure. Project teams have a strong incentive to move in this direction, as it will greatly expand market reach. More importantly, the field of investor relations has been stagnant for a long time. In our view, the future of IR is not a dry, procedural task, but a vibrant, multimedia, highly interactive, and proactive approach. It requires actively engaging in offline interactions, sparking discussions on social media, and telling compelling stories to attract new investors. This is the direction the industry must take. [Foresight News]