What is a crypto company's or DAO's treasury, and what is it for?

Money held to pay the way

A treasury is the money an organisation keeps to pay for its work. For a crypto company or a DAO, that can mean cash at banks, stablecoins and tokens.^1,3 A DAO, or decentralised autonomous organisation, is run by the collective decisions of its members. The Blockchain Research Lab calls the treasury a DAO's "financial backbone".²

Here is one example. At the end of 2025, the Uniswap Foundation said it held $49.9 million in US dollars and stablecoins, 15.1 million UNI tokens and 240 ETH.¹ It said the dollars and stablecoins were for grants and running costs, and the UNI was held for "future runway needs".¹

Ordinary companies have treasuries too. In September 2020, the board of MicroStrategy (now called Strategy) adopted a "Treasury Reserve Policy". It treated cash above the company's working capital needs as reserves, and named bitcoin its main reserve asset.^3,4 In January 2021, Tesla updated its investment policy for cash "not required to maintain adequate operating liquidity", then bought $1.50 billion of bitcoin.⁵ These are dated facts about two companies, not suggestions.

The Financial Stability Board (FSB), which advises the G20 on financial risks, noted in February 2022 that some non-financial companies had begun holding bitcoin as a treasury asset, but that the amounts were small for the system as a whole.⁶

The bills come first

Most running costs are paid in ordinary money. The Uniswap Foundation's costs, for example, included payroll, legal, accounting, technical audits and consultants.⁷ Module 23 explains why salaries, rent and suppliers still go through banks.

So treasuries often separate the money they will spend soon from the money they hold for the long term. ENS DAO, which runs the Ethereum Name Service, keeps money in layers under its 2026 investment policy:⁸

• A 6-month buffer of USDC, a dollar stablecoin, in the DAO's own wallet for operating costs.⁸
• An endowment, a pool of assets invested for the long term, that must hold at least three years of operating expenses in stablecoins.⁸
• The rest of the endowment, mostly in ETH, aiming for 60% ETH and 40% stablecoins overall.⁸

The policy also says money for operating costs should be taken out in stablecoins, and that selling ETH should be avoided unless the stablecoins are not enough.⁸

The native-token problem

A native token is a project's own token, such as UNI for Uniswap or OP for Optimism.^2,9 Many treasuries hold a lot of their own token, because the project created it. The Optimism Foundation's working budget, for example, was 30% of the initial OP supply.⁹ Module 13 shows how big the treasury slice of a token's supply can be.

In October 2023, the Blockchain Research Lab published a study of the 20 largest DAO treasuries, using data from September 2023. It found that 81.67% of their assets were in their own native tokens, and only 7.7% in stablecoins.² It said Uniswap and Arbitrum DAO held all of their reserves in their native token at the time.²

The researchers said this concentration gives control, but "exposes DAOs to alarming levels of market volatility and price fluctuation risks".² They also noted that owning a DAO's token does not give holders a right to take money out of its treasury.²

Two numbers that look alike

A treasury report can show two very different numbers: what everything is worth on screen today, and what can actually be spent.^10,5 In January 2023, an ENS proposal said the DAO kept almost all of its spendable treasury in ETH, and that "so much exposure to a single volatile asset places the DAO in a vulnerable position".¹⁰

Tesla's 2020 annual report made a similar point about its own bitcoin: prices may be unfavourable "at the time when we want or need to liquidate them".⁵ The rest of this module is about the gap between those two numbers.¹⁰