Investor Relations Handbook

While the chatter on twitter is all about DAT’s, corporate chains, and hyperspeculation, there’s a quieter -- but likely more impactful -- conversation happening on the inside by founders/senior employees at token projects: how do we scale our internal org from a startup where things are disorganized/constantly breaking to a token-based org that’s built to last?

From our conversations with projects, scaling the internal org means many things, including more rigorously tracking your competitive position (e.g., market share/revenue), thinking about how to go from being a single product to multi-product project, and perhaps less obviously, thinking about how to stand up a proper investor relations function (and no, we’re not talking about creating TikTok videos that feel icky and require wearing the costume of a charlatan).  

This last point will be the target of this piece, as it’s typically the workstream that even well-run projects struggle to execute on. In many ways, the investor relations function is one of the first “coming of age” moments for projects, as you’ll need to expand from having one primary stakeholder group — your customers/users — to two primary stakeholder groups: customers/users, and tokenholders. 

The crypto industry is maturing, and as part of that, the game on the field is rapidly changing with it. After numerous conversations with top projects, we decided to share a succinct handbook on everything investor relations to help teams graduate to the big leagues.  

What is investor relations (IR)?

In the same way that marketing/comms is product marketing aimed at customers/users, investor relations is product marketing for capital markets. Done well, IR essentially turns your product strategy, numbers, and project vision into a story the market can price. 

You can think of IR as a track that runs parallel to product marketing/comms, but uses language/terminology that’s catered to investors rather than customers/users. Essentially, IR runs on the same base information as product marketing, but it’s delivered to an audience of investors. 

Why is IR important?

A great IR function does three things for your project: 

1. Attracts strong investors. This point is so obvious that teams often forget it, but when you speak clearly and candidly about your project’s big vision, numbers, and competitive position, great (and long-term oriented) investors are more likely to buy into your project. All things being equal, a committed and patient capital base is better than a fickle and distrusting one. 

2. Aligns market cap to fundamentals. The market, which is made up of millions of large and small investors, is the ultimate arbiter of what price your project trades at. The market’s job is to use as much information as it can find to speculate on the fair value of your project (“speculation is the self-adjustment of society to the probable”). The more information you provide to the market, the more likely it is to accurately assess your value (positive information is likely to increase your token price, while negative/no information is likely to decrease it/keep it flat).  

3. Provides market intel. Savvy teams use the market price of their project as an additional source of information. For example, if your token price is down/flat, the market may be saying one of several things: (i) your market cap reflects your numbers/fundamentals, which are not good/deteriorating, (ii) your competitive position is not well perceived relative to competing projects, (iii) your story/vision/project is not understood by investors, and thus can’t be efficiently priced by the market, and/or (iv) the market disagree with strategies you’re pursuing (and you haven’t explained to the market why you think you’re right to pursue them anyway). The IR function explicitly documents and feeds this information into your internal decision-making process. Sometimes the market is right, and often the market is wrong…but in all cases, it’s a critical data point you can use to win the game on the field. 

At the end of the day, if you don’t do the investor relations work yourself, the market will do it for you (and often in ways that aren’t favorable to you). 

Why are projects thinking about it now?

It’s interesting to consider why teams are just now starting to think about investor relations. There are likely a few reasons for why IR has recently begun to take hold:

• The market is more mature than before. The best crypto projects in 2025 look very different from the best ones in 2021 or 2017 — projects are earning real revenue, and some are even generating a profit; teams are more experienced, and on the whole, stronger; there are more users who know how to use crypto apps (the “your thumbs will learn” effect).

• Teams are getting smarter on commercials. Historically, crypto team makeups skewed towards technical backgrounds. It was rare to find former tradfi people in senior roles at token projects. That’s beginning to change, as both tradfi people enter the space and technical/crypto-native operators begin to pick up on tradfi’s best practices (yes, tradfi can teach crypto some things too!).

• Regulatory changes. We’re no experts on regulatory matters, so we can only say what we see: there’s clearly a perception of policy loosening within the industry. That is, projects that would previously hesitate to communicate openly with tokenholders/engage in returns of capital through token buybacks are slowly starting to treat tokenholders as owners, and thus, open the kimono a bit more. 

What goes into IR?

In the tradfi world, the IR function varies by company. Similarly, we see crypto projects tackle IR in different ways. Generally though, here are the IR workstreams that we recommend standing up:

• Market story. Translate your product vision/roadmap into a story the market can price. The idea here is to reframe your traditional marketing/comms into investor-speak (e.g., explain the opportunity, market size, and business model). Solana’s “internet capital markets” pitch is a recent crypto example. Alternatively, we can turn to Nvidia, which breaks down its GPU/AI product story into a market story by saying it’s a full-stack platform company for AI (e.g., chips, networking, software, all with distinct revenue drivers and an enormous TAM). 

• Investor reporting. Host public quarterly calls that update tokenholders on your roadmap, numbers, key misses, and other major developments. The goal here is to provide up-to-date information to the market, and to show investors you’re accountable to your promises. Lido’s tokenholder update is an example of this point.

• Data & analytics. Display key operating metrics on your website, including circulating supply, fully-diluted supply, revenue, and buyback/burn data. While you can distribute this data through the media/sell-side to get more eyeballs on it (e.g., Blockworks/Messari), you really want to own the medium by displaying it on your own website first. This allows you to create a tighter relationship between you and your investor base. 

• Investor management. Develop a pipeline of existing + prospective investors you want for your project, and cultivate relationships with them. Most projects already do this with their VC’s, but as your project grows and has a new tokenholder base, you’ll want to systematize how you manage relationships.  

• Market intel. Track market sentiment/investor perception/twitter and media commentary, and have a process for driving this information into the broader organization. As we spoke about earlier, you can use this information to level up your internal decisionmaking and improve how you communicate your story to the market.  

When should you start thinking about IR?

IR is very much a later-stage function, and focusing on it too early can be putting the cart before the horse (IR, which is an inherently outward-facing function, comes after all of the inward-facing functions like product/marketing/ops are in order). 

While there’s no hard and fast rule for when it’s time to start an IR function, the following signals can tell you it’s time to start thinking about it:

• You have at least one product that’s live, has solid numbers (e.g., volumes/revenue), and is growing. IR can’t do its job without a working product with good numbers, and smart investors don’t buy hopium. The best time to do IR is after you ship your first great product. (Note: if you’re going from a single product to multi-product project, you can use the IR function to tease upcoming product launches…that way the market can price in your future product roadmap today). 

• Your market cap is over $300M. This is generally the bar for when projects are large enough to start thinking about IR. If your market cap is <$300M, it’s likely product is the issue, not investor sentiment. 

• You don’t think the market perceives you correctly. You’ll be surprised, but it’s entertainingly often that projects perceive themselves as a dog while investors perceive them as being a lizard. Bastardized animal analogies aside, the most common situation we see is projects think of themselves as being in category X while investors lump them into category Y. It’s the IR’s job to fix this misconception by clearly explaining why you are what you say you are. 

Coda

If you’re a project that’s scaling, consider IR as simply another ball you need to juggle: first there was the early-stage team-building, then there was the middle stage of getting to product-market-fit, and now, you’re on the mature stage of winning mindshare in the capital markets. As we’ve seen from the handbook above, the way to excel here is by standing up a killer IR function.