Runway under increasing native-token drawdown
ETH/BTC drawdown held at your stress input; only the native token haircut moves. This is the column governance should budget against, not the nominal total.
| Native drawdown | Treasury value | Runway (months) | Status |
|---|
A treasury is a balance sheet, not a screenshot
If most of the runway sits in native token, the honest comparison is not against today's price but against a drawdown scenario. For the corporate-treasury version of the same accretion/dilution math, see the Bitcoin treasury mNAV calculator; to compare where idle stablecoins could sit instead of cash, see the Aave vs Compound vs Morpho comparator.
Runway is the only metric a DAO can't vote its way out of
Most DAO treasury dashboards report a single number — total value, usually in dollars, usually dominated by the price of the protocol's own token. That number is easy to check and almost useless for planning, because it answers "what is this worth today" rather than the question contributors actually need answered: "how long can we keep paying people." A treasury sitting on $19m looks healthy until you notice $12m of it is the DAO's own governance token, which the market already knows the DAO would need to sell into any real emergency — and which tends to fall hardest exactly when a DAO's runway anxiety is highest, because sell pressure from a large, publicly visible treasury wallet is itself bearish information. Nominal runway (total treasury divided by net monthly burn) is the number in the deck. Cash runway (stablecoins only, divided by burn) is the number that survives contact with a bad month.
The gap between those two numbers is diversification risk, and it compounds with market risk rather than sitting next to it. CoinLaw's 2025 treasury survey found the median DAO holds roughly two-thirds of its treasury in its own native token and under a fifth in stablecoins — a concentration that would be considered reckless for a company's operating account, but is treated as normal because token treasuries were, for a long stretch, only ever marked up. A -50% drawdown in the native token plus a -30% drawdown in ETH/BTC is not a tail scenario; most tokens have seen worse inside a single bear market. Run that haircut through the balance sheet before the market runs it through for you, and the runway number that comes out the other side is the one worth defending in a governance proposal.
The fix is not "sell everything into stablecoins" — that forfeits the upside a treasury is often built to capture, and dumps a visible amount of the DAO's own token, which depresses the price the DAO is trying to protect. It's sizing: hold enough stablecoin runway (commonly cited as 12-18 months on a stress-tested basis, not a nominal one) to fund operations through a full drawdown without forced selling, and let the remainder ride in the native token, ETH/BTC or yield-bearing treasury assets. The rebalance figure below tells you the dollar amount of that gap directly, so a proposal to swap X tokens for stablecoins can point at a number instead of a vibe.
FAQ
How is DAO treasury runway calculated?
Nominal runway is total treasury value divided by net monthly burn (opex minus protocol revenue). That number is optimistic because it assumes the treasury's native-token and ETH/BTC holdings can be sold at today's mark without moving the market. Cash runway — stablecoin holdings alone divided by net burn — is the pessimistic floor: what's left if nothing else can be liquidated at all. Stress runway sits between the two: it applies a drawdown to the volatile holdings (default -50% to the native token, -30% to ETH/BTC) before dividing by burn, which is the number most DAO contributors should actually budget against.
What stablecoin percentage should a DAO treasury hold?
There's no regulatory minimum, but treasury researchers generally flag anything under 15-20% stablecoins as a concentration risk, because it means operating expenses depend on selling the DAO's own governance token or a correlated asset into every market downturn — exactly when its price (and the community's tolerance for sell pressure) is weakest. A commonly cited healthy band is 20-40% in stablecoins or equivalent low-volatility assets, sized to cover at least 12-18 months of burn on a stress-tested basis, with the rest free to hold the native token, ETH, BTC or yield-bearing RWA positions.
Why does a stress test matter more than the nominal treasury balance?
Because a treasury's native token typically falls hardest exactly when the DAO needs cash most — in a broad drawdown, thin order books turn a paper balance into a much smaller realizable one, and selling into that weakness compounds the token's decline. A treasury showing 36 months of nominal runway can show under 10 months once a -50% haircut is applied to the token and -30% to ETH/BTC, which is the gap between what the balance sheet says and what governance can actually spend without triggering its own death spiral.