Treasuries in crypto were supposed to bring stability, but failed altcoins have turned that idea into a bit of a mess.
Instead of stacking assets with real staying power, a lot of projects loaded their reserves with their own tokens or trendy altcoins during the last bull run. On paper, those treasuries looked massive. In practice, many of them are close to useless now. By 2025, you still see DAOs sitting on piles of tokens nobody wants to buy, assets so illiquid that they can’t fund operations without tanking their own price.
Take a look at what happened with some governance-heavy treasuries. In 2022, plenty of DAOs counted their native tokens as “reserves.” Fast forward, and those tokens are down 80–90%. That means their runway is gone, even though they technically still hold a big stash. It’s not much different from a company paying employees in monopoly money and hoping everyone treats it like real cash.
Even some Layer 1s that looked well-funded are facing the same problem. Projects like NEAR and Algorand built treasuries around their native tokens, but the market downturn left them scrambling to cut costs and slow down development. Treasury size didn’t matter if it was entirely tied to speculative value. That’s not stability, that’s being locked into your own price chart.
Meanwhile, projects that held Bitcoin, Ethereum, and stablecoins are in a stronger position. ETH staking rewards now provide steady cash flow, BTC remains the most liquid asset in the space, and USDC or USDT act as cash equivalents. Look at how Ethereum’s ecosystem DAOs continue to fund grants and research through a mix of ETH and stablecoins, while others who went all-in on altcoins have stalled.
The interesting part is how treasuries are adjusting in 2025. A number of DAOs have quietly started swapping native tokens into ETH staking positions to secure long-term yield. Some protocols are even setting rules where only a fraction of reserves can be in native tokens, forcing diversification into BTC or stables. And we’ve seen large treasuries shifting into tokenized treasuries or RWA products, not because it’s trendy, but because teams finally realize they need something closer to “real world cash flow” to survive.
The lesson is simple: treasuries aren’t about flexing during bull markets, they’re about weathering storms. Failed altcoins blurred that truth, but 2025 is forcing a reset. The real standard for a resilient treasury is already clear, BTC, ETH, stables, and maybe some tokenized yield strategies on top. Everything else is noise.
