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.