How do you work out a crypto company's runway, and should its own token count?

How long will the money last?

Runway is how long an organisation's money will cover its costs. In January 2025, for example, an ENS proposal said the DAO's dollar reserves had run out and that it was "prudent to secure a 12-month runway" to cover operating expenses.¹ Operating expenses are the everyday costs of running an organisation, such as payroll, legal and office costs.⁴

Public companies in the US must discuss the same question in their annual reports. SEC rules ask them to analyse whether they can raise enough cash to meet their needs over the next 12 months, and separately over the longer term.⁵

How some treasuries set a target

Published examples show different targets and different ways of counting.^6,1,2,7,8

ENS's 2026 policy says this stablecoin floor is "Unconditional" and comes before its 60/40 target mix of ETH and stablecoins.² In its 2025 report, the Uniswap Foundation took a different approach: it counted UNI for future runway, which it said allowed "additional upside exposure".⁷ Upside exposure cuts both ways: if the token falls, so does that part of the runway.^7,3

Why the native token is a weak number

Prices move fast. The FSB noted in 2022 that bitcoin rose from $29,000 to about $68,000 in 2021, then fell to about $38,000 by late January 2022.⁹ A September 2024 proposal to Arbitrum DAO said "the volatility of the ARB token has highlighted the need for prudent diversification".³

Selling moves the price. A big sale uses up the buyers at the best price and then fills at worse ones, as Module 18 explains. That is why tools such as TWAP orders exist, to split big trades into smaller pieces.¹⁰ Tesla warned in 2021 that prices may be unfavourable "at the time when we want or need to liquidate".¹¹

More tokens may be coming. Module 13 explains unlocks. With shares, the SEC's investor site warns that a price may drop in anticipation that locked-up shares will be sold when a lock-up ends.¹²

The token is not a claim on the treasury. The Blockchain Research Lab notes that owning a DAO's token gives no right to access its treasury, only a say in how the funds are used.¹³ So the token's screen value is a price someone might pay, not money the organisation already has.^13,11

Stress testing a price drop

A stress test asks how something would hold up in a bad scenario. The US Federal Reserve runs stress tests on large banks, to see whether they could absorb losses in a hypothetical recession.¹⁴ The same idea works for a treasury: work out the runway again as if the token price had fallen.^14,3

Real treasuries see this kind of fall. KPK, the firm that manages ENS DAO's endowment, reported that it fell from $101.6 million in January 2026 to $67.7 million at the end of June, "almost entirely" because of the ETH price.¹⁵ It said the stablecoin part "held its value".¹⁵ Its figures also include an $8.17 million transfer out of the endowment in June, to pay for the DAO's spending in the second half of 2026. KPK said this lowered the endowment's value but left the DAO's total reserves unchanged.¹⁵