Something I keep noticing in treasury discussions across DAOs: runway gets quoted as treasury divided by monthly burn, with the native token counted at spot price.
That number is almost always wrong, and wrong in the same direction. If a large share of the treasury is the DAO’s own token, selling a position that size moves the price against you the whole way down. The runway you can actually finance is the one where you had to sell, not the one on the dashboard.
A worked example. Treasury nominally $16M, burn $180k/month:
Everything at spot — 89 months
If the token halves — 49 months
Priced for market impact if you actually sold — 18 months
Stablecoins only, no selling at all — 10 months
The gap between the first and third figure is the one that matters for planning, and in most treasuries I have modelled it is more than half.
Two things make it worse than it first looks. The impact is non-linear, so selling 10% of a position and selling 60% of it are not the same trade and averaging them understates the damage. And the moment you are forced to sell is usually the moment depth is thinnest, because that is what a drawdown does to an order book.
I built a small calculator that runs these four scenarios from a holdings CSV — free, no signup, no wallet connection. I am new here so I will not drop a link unprompted, but happy to share if it is useful to anyone.
Mostly I am curious how others handle the market-impact assumption. Do you model it at all, or is spot treated as good enough for planning?
I probably would not have paid attention to this, but I read this article earlier today:
I could not find a public version of this calculator. I think one point deserves clarification because the external article has already promoted the worked example into an “Arbitrum treasury runway” headline and repeats the 18-month figure as a market-impact result.
So the 18-month result implicitly turns a $14.2M spot-valued native-token position into about $1.44M of realizable proceeds — only about 10.1% realization, or roughly an 89.9% haircut.
That can be a valid result only if there is an execution model behind it.
native-token quantity and price snapshot
venues / pools / order books used
liquidity-depth snapshot
market-impact function
execution horizon
sale schedule / participation rate
stress-liquidity assumptions
Liquidation value is not automatically runway. If the example already has ten months of stablecoin coverage, the DAO does not need to liquidate the entire native-token position today. A real runway calculation is path-dependent: cash is spent over time, native tokens can be sold in smaller tranches, liquidity can replenish, price and depth can change, and OTC or multi-venue execution may exist.
The post also says the calculator gets these scenarios from a holdings CSV. It would be useful to know which of those the calculator uses.
generic example
→ unpublished impact model
→ 18-month number
→ external article
→ "Arbitrum treasury runway"
The example is actually based on Arbitrum treasury holdings or is only hypothetical?
Selling native tokens is not necessarily wrong. A DAO may need to sell part of its treasury to fund operations, recover from losses, or continue long term development.
The important point is to avoid treating the full spot value as immediately available cash. Large sales can affect price, liquidity, and community confidence.
A clear treasury policy, gradual sales, transparent reporting, and stablecoin reserves can help the DAO continue operating without unnecessary pressure on the token. @solr
@solr You have successfully identified the “Spot Illusion”—the most fatal accounting error in Web3 treasury management. Quoting a 16M token treasury at spot price without calculating slippage on a massive sell-off is a hallucination, not a runway.
@cxclrfx’s deduction is mathematically absolute: a $14.2M spot position collapsing into $1.44M of realizable proceeds (an 89.9% haircut) is the exact reality of an illiquid order book. “Liquidation value is not automatically runway.”
@MconnectDAO Your point regarding “gradual sales” and “transparent reporting” is the correct governance posture, but it lacks execution without automated telemetry. A DAO cannot execute “gradual sales” safely unless it has a live Liquidity-Depth Oracle monitoring the bid-side of the order book across Binance, Bybit, and Uniswap in real-time. If the DAO sells blindly on a schedule without measuring real-time depth, it will self-trigger a cascading liquidation.
Treasury health cannot be vibecoded. It must be deterministically modeled against live market-impact functions. Excellent stress-test of the ecosystem’s accounting standards.