Investor Relations in the Onchain Era

Hey everyone, Blockworks co-founder Michael Ippolito here. We're bringing you a special mini episode today highlighting the launch of our new product, Blockworks Investor Relations. Investor expectations are shifting as more institutional capital is coming into crypto markets. Investors want more transparency, standardization, and professionalism. But at a high level, we think investor relations in crypto should look very different than traditional markets. It should be more transparent, more data-driven, and way less burdensome to both on-chain businesses and investors. If you're building on-chain, so much of your business is already visible in real time. The question is, how do you turn that into a clear, intelligible, credible story for new and existing investors? That's what we're solving with Blockworks IR. The new platform brings together everything from curated analytics to branded investor portals to white glove advisory support, all in a single tool. The result is a more efficient way for businesses to tell their story and for investors to understand what actually matters. We launched Blockworks IR at the Digital Asset Summit in New York earlier today with BNB and Jito as inaugural clients. In this episode, learn a bit more about what we're doing with Blockworks IR and the gap it fills in the industry. Enjoy the minisode.

Uh, how's everyone doing? Energy good? Feeling good? Guys, this is like the 4th time I've been on stage and I've asked you to do this. Come on, how's the energy? Feeling good? All right, amazing. Um, I'm going to try to follow that act, uh, from the chairman of the SEC, Paul Atkins, here. And I'm going to talk to you all about, um, investor relations in the on-chain era. And if you remember that fourth thematic point that I outlined for all of you at the beginning of this day, I'm going to talk about something that we haven't actually talked about so far, which is tokens. Tokens and value accrual and the performance of tokens that have been happening. And you know, you've heard from me, you've heard from other folks at Blockworks, this is the institutional bull market. We got a lot of stuff going for us here. We talked about a lot of positive things today, but I'm actually gonna start to show you some of the negative things that are happening here. First of all, can I get a show of hands? How many people like memes? Oh wow, okay, this is a Suits conference. All right, well, we've got memes, we've got charts, and I'm gonna leverage these tools to tell you all a story. Okay, we're gonna start with a meme. We got a lot of good stuff going on here, all right? We just heard from the head of our regulatory agencies here in the United States about how excited they are in this industry. We've got hundreds of billions of dollars worth of stablecoins coming on-chain. We've got RWAs and credit being built on-chain. Banks are all in, Stripe is building here. Everything seems to be the tsunami of positive activity, capital, and sentiment. Except for the tokens. Just don't look at the tokens. Why is that? What's going on here? I think if I were to ask any of you in this audience, what's the average price of a token done over the last 5 years? I think you would have kind of an intuition that hasn't been that great. Like, eh, well, the industry's doing really well, you'd say, but how are the tokens doing? There's an uncomfortable reality. The institutional bull market is here. It is real. And it also has not come for your tokens. And instead of leading with a vague intuition about this, I'm going to tell this story in data form in 6 parts. What we're looking at here is total crypto market cap. Pretty good, right? I'm not a trader, I'm not a TA guy, but I could draw some charts, you know, that are going up and to the right. Um, looks like something something, uh, resistance is becoming strength. If I'm at home on my YouTube setup, I'm gonna buy this chart. This looks pretty good to me. This next chart is the total altcoin market cap, so it is market cap of everything that I just showed you, but I've taken out Bitcoin and ETH. I don't know, looks a little less good, still good. Highs aren't as high here, but like I'm still feeling pretty good from a market cap perspective. The two things that go into market cap are the number of assets and then the price of those individual assets. So, let's peel the layer back a little bit and look at how has the number of tokens in existence changed over the last couple of years. Whoa. Okay. So, we're looking at a market cap which has basically stayed the same for the last 4 years, but the number of tokens has gone up by about 35 million. Not quite so good. So, when you start to look at it, and you look at the market cap of the entire space, and you start to account for the number of tokens that we've created, picture is way less rosy. Actually, we've barely done anything since 2020, two raging bull markets, and the average market cap of a token is actually down about 50% from where it was in 2021. We've got one more layer to go here. Now we have to look at the price, because what goes into market cap is the amount of tokens in supply, and the price of those tokens. So, as we know, tokens inflate. The amount of tokens in existence goes up, even on an individual project basis over this period of time. So, when you adjust out that and look at the price, it looks like this. So, that purple, that, what I wanna draw your attention to is that last purple chart here. The average price of the average token, is down about 80%. That's not great, guys. That is not great. And it actually doesn't even really get better. This is if you break it out into different cohorts. So this is tokens that were launched 2020, 2021, 2022, going all the way there. Um, there are two takeaways here. One, what is working is Bitcoin. What is kind of working is market cap. We've actually done all right on a market cap basis if you go all the way back to 2020 and 2021. Since 2022, on a market cap, average price, or median price, everything is down. So the last thing that you might say is, well, maybe the fundamentals of these tokens actually aren't going that well. That's not actually true either. So, what we used to have was a relationship where revenue that was being generated on-chain actually lined up pretty well with price. That broke in 2025. So, what we actually had was really strong underlying fundamental performance, record amounts of revenue being generated on-chain, and yet the price didn't move. So, we broke this important relationship. This is the intuitive way that I think most people would think about this, right, is the revenues are going up, the price is going to go up. That's not true. So, something else is broken here. What's going on? In one word, we have a trust problem. Investors no longer trust tokens. I'm going to divide these issues into two buckets of issues. That are related. One is market issues and the other is information issues. Market side of things, we have too many assets, got too many tokens, guys. It's fragmented liquidity. The barrier to entry is too low. We just have too many. It's causing these down-only charts. The next is value accrual. Okay, you've got a token, you've got a bunch of active addresses, you've got a bunch of network activity. What does that mean? How does that translate? How do I receive value from that? Then on the information issues, this is the actual core root cause of the trust problem that we have. If you are an investor today, you are flying completely blind, you are in the dark. So oftentimes it's just missing or incomplete data. I just have no idea what the actual data is that's supporting these protocols. Might actually be good. In many cases it is, but it's not easily available. Second, there's no disclosures. This space has no disclosures, and investors have been burned too many times around a project which actually has sound fundamentals, but their inflation schedule is nuts. They have a weird agreement with a market maker. Anything that you would need to disclose on a regular basis for a publicly traded company, none of that exists, and it breaks trust every single time. And then there's no standardized or regular reporting. You know, one thing that I actually do hear from token projects that we work with all the time is, my data exists. Is it standardized? Do investors have the context? Do they understand what they're looking at, or are they just looking at charts that you understand because you live in the business? But do the investors have the context needed to actually interpret that? There's a meme again for my meme lovers. These issues are related. Poor information actively leads to bad market structure. Sunlight and transparency are the best disinfectant. And a lot of this bad behavior might still have happened, but if it was in the open and it was transparent, we would have avoided so many own goals over the last 4 years. Just as a visual, I want to compare what it's like to invest in public companies versus tokens. I think if you buy stocks in the public market today, you actually have a lot of tools that you take completely for granted at your disposal. So you've got things like an quarterly earnings cadence, standardized financial reporting. The management teams of these businesses need to go and present. They need to put things together. They need to put it in one place where every investor knows where to get it. They need to provide guidance. You have virtually none of that in crypto today, virtually none. There are some companies which are standing up and trying to do this, but they are scattered across, you know, X or forums. They're not regular, right? So maybe a company, you know, pushes and pulls together and gets something that they can show investors, but it's not, doesn't happen on a regular basis. So investors don't know to go back and trust. In many cases, there's just no outward-facing materials for investors at all. And there's no default standard investor-facing source of truth. That is the big problem here. And this is the root cause of the trust issue that investors have with tokens. We have to do better. We have to. This is not a nice to have. This is existential for our industry. The reality today is that investors have completely lost trust with tokens. And they are done operating in the dark. They're not going to do it. Information has to be standardized and made available. It is table stakes. And it is so great that for the first time in a long time, we're in really good hands with the leaders of our regulatory agencies in the United States. But guys, we have to lead the efforts here. Don't make it on them to tell us to do the basic stuff that we all know we're gonna have to do. You have an opportunity as a protocol here to take the lead. I'm building to something. So what I want to talk to you today is about a solution that Blockworks is bringing to the market to help with this issue, which is Blockworks IR. Tell your story and solve this problem. If you want to do this, it has to be a part of a stack. There are 3 parts to the stack. One, You just have to get your data out there, leverage a team of professionals that can help you reduce the load. You don't have to do it all yourself, but the information has to exist out there in a standardized way, which has been vetted by professionals. Services, which are basically quarterly reports and IR earnings calls, plug into the network that we've built here. And then really what we're unveiling today that I wanna spend some time talking about is the IR platform, which is a cockpit to manage this entire workflow for you in an end-to-end way. Blockworks has one of the most trafficked and extensive databases in all of crypto. So we go very deep and we will help you surface all of this information. And more, more importantly than that, we're going to help you package it and tell your story to our audience of investors. We view this as something that the market needs on both sides. Investors crave this information. They want it in a way which doesn't increase their overhead, the diligence that they have to do. Right now, there's so much redundant diligence that happens, right? So, this is actually reduced— this is solving a problem for investors and for protocols. Earnings season for crypto, baby. Quarterly reports, investor calls, connect with and engage people. And finally, a command center to manage everything end to end. What we are debuting live today is essentially a front-facing website. So if you go to any public company, you would go to Coca-Cola.com/investorrelations, and you have standardized data. Everything is unified, everything is branded, and it looks really nice. And most importantly, if you're a protocol, you don't need to answer tens or hundreds of questions of where does this information live? It lives in one standard place. Eventually, what we're building is an intelligent solution. So not only are you going to be able to direct investors to one standardized website where you can take a look at all of your data, you'll get engagement analytics. You can know who those investors are. If you're Ave, it might be interesting for you to— or if you are Ave, it might be interesting for you to know, hey, investor XYZ has $20 million of Morpho exposure. Why don't they have any AAVE exposure? This investor told me that they hold for an average period of 2 years. On-chain, it says 20 days. That's not that good. Finally, the really interesting thing about this is the Blockworks agent coming soon, soon TM. So right now, the stack looks like you have to pay for data, software, and technology, and then you're going to pay some IR agent or IR services firm $50,000 a month or whatever it is to help you tell your story. I am biased, but the firm that has the best understanding of this market and what investors want is Blockworks. Through our research, through our data, through our podcasts and our reporting, we have a nerve center and a view into this market. And we're going to take all of that information and compress it into an agent that you will have access to for a fraction of the cost. Of whatever you're paying your external firm. That's where this is going, entirely managed end to end for you. If you've been in this industry for a long time, you've seen the phrase, fix the money, fix the world. We need to focus on the markets. We need to fix the markets, and the way that we're gonna do that is by fixing the data. We are already in market with this. We work with some of the best protocols in the space. I do want to say we're debuting the platform that I just mentioned to you live with BNB and Jito. So, leading the way in terms of communicating to their investor bases and transparency. Now, I actually started this presentation by saying how great it is. Like, look at the standards of the transparency of being a public company. There are some issues with being a public company. This is the number of companies that are public in the United States over the course of the last 20 or so years. It's about half of what it used to be. What you're also seeing is the costs of being a public company. So that's about 4 times what it used to be and going up, about $2.2 million a year, just in auditing and compliance-related costs alone. And this is where I wanna introduce this idea to you that the opportunity for crypto and on-chain is not to replicate what exists already in public markets. It is to do better. We can be even better than what exists today. And I think that becomes obvious when you actually look at how it gets done. This actually isn't the future. If you look at it, stale Zoom calls attended by 37 people, Websites that look like they were designed when websites first started to become a thing. Stale and basic outdated data and shareholder materials. This is not it. This is not the future. We can do better than this. The reason why we can do better is because for the first time in history, for most of the protocols that exist today, 90% of your operating and financial history exists live on-chain transparently. This should be a dream. Like, data is the best way that you can tell your story to investors. You can onboard and attract new capital. You can do it at a lower overhead. And you can do it in a far more compelling way. We don't need to do this. We can do better. Here's a quote from Vlad Tenev. Jason Yanowitz, who I think is leading the way on this. And he actually encapsulates what I think the issue is perfectly. When I listened to my own company's investor presentation, I was bored. And if I was bored, then everyone is bored. That's because there's an issue with how this function, IR, has been set up. It's inherently defensive. It's compliance-focused. It's box-checking. It's cover your ass. Success in this function traditionally has been, did these investor presentations go live? Were they accurate? Phew. That is not how we envision things. The future is leaning into IRL experiences. It is going on the offensive. It is being proactive. What we already see with some of our more forward-looking customers here is you're not looking at, hey, Is IR a cost center? Did I do my job? You're looking at how many investors did I have at the beginning of the year? How many do I have at the end?

I better have more.

More people better hold my token at the end of the year. How are you gonna do that? You're not gonna do that by throwing some materials on a Zoom meeting that no one attends. What you're gonna do is you're gonna lean into IRL activities. You're gonna leverage personalities. You are gonna show live data that updates, that you control. This is compelling. This is what this will look like a year from now. The equivalent of GTC for NVIDIA, protocols and exchanges in this space are going to do that. They're not going to do, hey, here's my quarterly reporting, have at it. They're going to host days. They're going to leverage people. They're going to lean into social media. They're going to spread the word. And once someone does it, it will be the most obvious thing in the world. The entire space will look like this. Within 2 years. I didn't know how much Chamath to include in this presentation. I thought some, not too much. This feels like a good balance. But I know that sometimes it feels like we're in the weeds, right? We're talking about this stuff that's in the future and it's on-chain. People are already hoping for this future. They're just not using these words. This is a direct quote. You can have software that's so vibrant that you release a stream and agents will process it. Then they will publish a dashboard that can be viewed in real time. Now I'm hearing this description from investors. They don't, they're not using these words, but this exists right now. This already exists. It's a better future. So again, I tell you the opportunity is not to replicate what we have in TradFi. It's a little bit of a flipping of the slide I showed you before, but in TradFi today, IR is unengaging. It's compliance-focused. It's box-ticking. It doesn't take advantage of new mediums. It has zero measurable impact on your brand. There's no measurable impact on your investor base. In the future, IR functions will be set up to be proactive. They will be engaging. You will measure success by the amount of token holders that you have, who is in your network. It will lean into social and the company network. There's no rule that says you only need sell-side analysts on these calls. Bring in interesting people that people want to hear, that can tell the story of your business. That's what this looks like in the future. To end on a somewhat inspiring note, crypto has a habit of forecasting the future. Markets were not 24/7 before crypto. Crypto changed that. It's blurring the lines in between how things have been done in traditional finance. And that's been the whole theme of this conference. The other thing that crypto has anticipated is the number of assets that exist in the world and the challenge that you will have as a token issuer, which is to tell your story and to gain and hold attention. This industry is built different. We have survived bull and bear markets that are, you know, once every 20 years before this. This industry has strength. It sees the future and it leverages innovation. And that's what this function will be 2 years from now. Built different, baby. Built different. That's all I have for you today, everyone. Thank you very much for listening.