TLDR:
- Fewer than 1% of 150+ audited protocols publicly disclose their market-making arrangements to investors.
- Only 3% of protocols maintain a dedicated IR hub, leaving most data scattered across forums and platforms.
- Just 9% of protocols have filed the Blockworks Token Transparency Framework since its SEC presentation in 2025.
- While 91% of protocols have accessible revenue data, 62% offer no active value accrual beyond governance rights.
Token transparency remains a critical challenge for the crypto industry in 2026. A new audit covering more than 150 protocols has exposed how poorly projects communicate financial data to investors.
The review examined 15 binary metrics across major sectors, including DEXs, lending platforms, L1s, L2s, and DePIN.
Results show that raw data largely exists on-chain. However, the communication infrastructure needed to present it to institutions is nearly absent.
Market Maker Disclosures and IR Infrastructure Fall Critically Short
The audit found that fewer than 1% of protocols disclose market-maker terms to the public. Market makers shape price discovery through token loans, option structures, and performance incentives.
In traditional finance, such material agreements are disclosed as standard practice. In crypto, however, investors operate entirely without this information.
Connor King, who led the audit, described the scale of the problem plainly. “One hundred and fifty protocols. Billions in combined daily volume. Only one publicly discloses any information about its market-making arrangements,” he wrote. He identified this as “the single most consequential transparency gap in the industry.”
Meteora remains the sole exception among more than 150 reviewed protocols. It disclosed its market-making arrangements through its 2025 Annual Token Holder Report. Every other protocol in the dataset provided no such information to market participants.
Only 3% of protocols have a dedicated investor relations hub. These include Meteora, Jito, Jupiter, Raydium, and MetaDAO.
King noted that “every other protocol distributes information across blogs, governance forums, X threads, and third-party platforms.” He added, “The gap is not data availability. It’s communication infrastructure.”
The Blockworks Token Transparency Framework (TTF), presented to the SEC in June 2025, covers 18 disclosure criteria. It addresses supply, allocation, financials, and market structure. Yet only 13 of 150+ protocols have filed it.
That represents just 9% of the full dataset. King noted that “the filing rate dropped from 25% at n=53 to 9% at n=150+,” adding that “zero L1s, zero L2s, and zero infrastructure protocols have filed.”
Value Accrual Models and Data Infrastructure Show Uneven Progress
Active value accrual mechanisms exist in only 38% of protocols reviewed. The audit defined this broadly as any live mechanism directing economic value to token holders.
Six distinct models were identified, ranging from direct fee distribution and buyback-and-burn to staking revenue share and ve-model epoch distributions.
King noted that “62% of protocols in the dataset fall into the last category — governance-only tokens with no value accrual.”
This group includes some of the largest names in the industry. The sector divide is wide. “62% of perps protocols have active value accrual. 12% of L1/L2 tokens do,” he wrote.
He added that “the perps sector treats token holder alignment as a competitive advantage. L1 foundations have not gotten there yet.”
On the data infrastructure side, platforms like Token Terminal, Dune, Artemis, DefiLlama, and Blockworks Research cover 85–95% of the dataset.
Around 72% of protocols appear on four or more of these platforms. Raw data access, therefore, is not the core problem.
King put it directly: “Crypto protocols are not hiding their fundamentals. They are failing to present them.” He described the missing layer as the translation infrastructure that turns data into institutional confidence. That layer, he noted, “barely exists.”
The audit concludes that the cost of building IR infrastructure is low relative to the capital markets benefit. As King stated, “the protocols that invest in this now will be the ones institutional allocators can underwrite first.” The path forward is clear, and the tools to act on it already exist.
