The story of crypto is a story about adoption. In the beginning, crypto was purely a retail game. This was the bootstrap era.
Anonymous founders. White papers and dreams. Bitcointalk threads. Discords and Telegrams. If you wanted in, you had to live on Twitter/X and dig through governance forums and GitHub repos at 2 am.
Fun era. Important era. But from an institutional perspective, mostly uninvestable.
Then came the second phase: the scale-up era.
Exchanges professionalized. Custody got solved. DeFi protocols like Uniswap and Aave found product-market fit. Onchain businesses started to look less like toys and more like companies. Podcasts, newsletters, conferences and research gave the industry a real narrative layer.
That opened the door for the first serious capital.
Today, we are entering a new phase: the institutional era.
Stripe has a chain. Robinhood has a chain. Banks are issuing stablecoins. Prediction markets are integrating with major news outlets. Real revenue and cash flows are accruing onchain.
And the marginal buyer is changing.
For most of the last decade, flows came from two places: retail and crypto venture. Now, the next dollar is coming from liquid token funds, multi-asset hedge funds, asset managers, macro shops, family offices, and eventually, pensions and endowments.
The institutions want to buy our tokens.
We still make it way too hard for them.
The Institutional Gap
If you sit inside a fund and try to build a serious Solana allocation, you run into the same problems again and again:
- Everything is fragmented. Data, docs, dashboards, governance, research, Twitter threads. Fifteen tabs open. No canonical place to diligence an ecosystem or a token.
- You do not trust the numbers. Public aggregators are often wrong or inconsistent. Labels change. Definitions change. One bad input flows into your model or IC memo and the idea dies.
- Nothing is written in your language. Most materials are built for crypto natives. Not for investment committees that think in revenue, retention, unit economics, risk, users, cash flows and execution.
This is not a talent problem or an interest problem. It is an information problem.
Introducing Lightspeed IR
Today, Blockworks is partnering with the Solana Foundation to launch Lightspeed IR, an investor-relations platform built for professional investors and token issuers.
We are starting with Solana because they sit at the intersection of crypto nativity and institutional relevance. They have real users, real applications, real revenue, and a cracked founder ecosystem. The story is there — it just needs to be delivered in a way institutions can underwrite.
Lightspeed IR is a gated, professional environment for:
- Liquid token funds
- Institutional allocators and asset managers
- Family offices
- Solana ecosystem teams and large token holders
What you get in one place:
- High-fidelity onchain data on the Solana network and leading applications, powered by Blockworks’ data infrastructure
- Institutional research that turns raw onchain activity into simple, fundamental frameworks and IC-ready memos
- Ecosystem intelligence and IR workflows for roadmap updates, KPI packs, governance changes, token events and direct communication between teams and allocators
If you run a fund, Lightspeed IR becomes your Solana starting point.
If you build on Solana, it becomes your investor hub.
In a world of noise, Lightspeed IR is the signal.
We launch in Q1.
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Source: https://blockworks.co/news/blockworks-solana-investor-relations-platform
