Crypto treasury management after a raise comes down to three limits the board sets in writing: how many years of spending sit outside your own token, what share of the treasury may be spent each year, and how much may sit with any one counterparty. The Ethereum Foundation’s June 2025 policy is a useful public benchmark. It holds 2.5 years of operating expenses in fiat terms and caps annual spending at 15% of the treasury, falling toward 5% over five years.
Who decides this
The CFO runs the treasury; the foundation council, or the board of the operating company, sets the policy the CFO runs it against. The council is accountable for the runway target, the spending cap, the allowed assets and the counterparty limits. The CFO is accountable for staying inside them, reporting against them each quarter, and keeping the records that prove it.
Where a foundation and a labs company both hold funds, write one policy per entity. In our experience, a shared treasury with informal transfers between entities is where the hardest questions later start.
How much runway should sit outside your own token?
Hold enough fiat or stablecoins to run the plan for at least two years without selling the token, and set the rule for when you sell before you need to. A treasury held mostly in its own token is a bet that the price will be there when payroll is due.
The Ethereum Foundation’s policy makes the rule mechanical. As summarised by Four Pillars (opens in new tab), the fiat target equals annual operating spend multiplied by the runway in years, set at 2.5. The remainder stays in ETH. Decrypt reported (opens in new tab) that the buffer works out to about 37.5% of the treasury, and that ETH is sold when cash falls below the buffer, sized to the cash required.
Our view: a younger project should hold a longer buffer than that, not a shorter one. Its token trades with less depth than ETH, so selling to refill the buffer moves the price more. We would start at two to three years and raise it if the token’s daily volume is thin relative to planned sales. That range is our judgement, not a market standard.
The second number is the spending cap, and it matters as much as the buffer. Runway planning that fixes the buffer but not the burn simply moves the problem forward. In the Ethereum Foundation’s design, the cap is a share of total assets, reported each quarter, and spending above it can be challenged by the board or the community.
We would copy the mechanism rather than the figure. Set the cap as a percentage of the treasury’s value, not a fixed budget, so that spending falls automatically when the market does. Report against it every quarter. Require a council resolution, minuted and published, to exceed it.
How far should the treasury diversify, and into what?
Diversify by purpose first and by asset second: operating cash, a reserve, the native token held for the ecosystem, and any yield positions should each have their own limit. In our experience, the expensive mistakes come from mixing those purposes, not from picking the wrong asset.
The Ethereum Foundation keeps its fiat side in liquid cash for operations, fixed-term deposits, bonds and tokenized real-world assets. It also puts part of its ETH to work through staking and selected lending protocols, chosen against stated security and risk criteria.
| Bucket | Purpose | Main risk | Limit the policy should set |
|---|---|---|---|
| Operating cash | Payroll and vendors over the near-term operating horizon | Bank or stablecoin issuer failure | Maximum per bank and per issuer |
| Reserve | Runway beyond the operating horizon | Duration and liquidity of the instrument | Allowed instruments and maximum maturity |
| Native token | Ecosystem grants, incentives, partnerships | Price and market depth | Maximum monthly sales; disclosure of sales |
| Yield positions | Return on idle assets | Smart-contract, counterparty and liquidity risk | Approved protocols; maximum share of treasury |
Our view: keep yield positions out of the operating bucket entirely. A position that can be withdrawn in a day under normal conditions may not be in stressed ones. Treasury diversification that relies on it for payroll is not diversification.
How much can sit with any one counterparty?
Set a hard limit per bank, per stablecoin issuer, per custodian and per exchange, and assume each one can become unavailable without notice. Two events show why.
In March 2023, Circle confirmed (opens in new tab) that $3.3 billion of roughly $40 billion in USDC reserves was at Silicon Valley Bank when it failed. USDC briefly traded about 2% below a dollar on some decentralised venues. A treasury holding only USDC held a claim on that bank too, one step removed.
In November 2022, the Solana Foundation disclosed (opens in new tab) that about $1 million in cash sat on FTX as of 6 November 2022, days before the exchange halted withdrawals. That was under 1% of its cash, which kept the impact small. It also disclosed FTX shares and FTT and SRM tokens held on the exchange. The small cash exposure limited the damage, and the disclosure was possible because the records existed.
What we would write into the policy: no more than a fixed share of operating cash at any one bank or in any one stablecoin; no treasury assets left on an exchange beyond what an active trade requires; and a quarterly count of every counterparty, including the banks behind your stablecoins.
Where should the assets sit, and who can move them?
Separate the people who approve a transfer from the people who can execute one, and keep the reserve with a regulated custodian or under a multisig whose signers are named and independent. The choice between self-custody and a custodian is a governance decision; our guide on treasury governance in Related covers signers, thresholds and board controls in detail.
Self-custody through a multisig gives speed and control, but the foundation carries the key risk and the operational burden. A regulated custodian adds segregation and an external control layer, at the cost of fees and slower movement. Some treasuries use both: a multisig for operating funds and a custodian for the reserve.
Panthea, the institutional digital-asset platform built and operated by Alcyone’s partners (opens in new tab), uses the second model. Panthea provides the technology and product layer, while custody is held by Blockfort AG, a Swiss-regulated financial intermediary, in segregated accounts that Panthea describes as bankruptcy-remote. Any treasury should confirm that a custodian’s regime and account structure fit its own jurisdiction before relying on it.
What records will you need when someone asks?
Keep records that let you state, for any date, what the treasury held, where it sat, who approved each movement and why. Auditors, token holders, exchanges and regulators will each ask a version of that question.
For entities that report under US GAAP, part of this is now mandatory. FASB’s ASU 2023-08 (opens in new tab), in force for fiscal years beginning after 15 December 2024, measures in-scope crypto assets at fair value, with changes recorded in net income. Entities in scope must disclose each significant holding’s name, cost basis, fair value and units, give an annual reconciliation, and describe any contractual sale restrictions. Tokens the entity issued itself fall outside the standard, so the native token held by its own foundation needs separate treatment; take the accountants’ view.
The Ethereum Foundation’s policy adds a governance layer: quarterly and annual reporting to its board and executive team, with key figures published. That is the standard we would hold a funded foundation to.
What goes wrong: the question you could not answer
The failure is rarely a bad trade. It is a question the treasury cannot answer when it matters. An exchange’s listing team asks for treasury wallets and planned sales. An auditor asks for cost basis by holding. A token holder asks why the foundation sold during a drawdown, and who approved it.
The team knows the answers informally. The records do not exist. Signers changed and nobody updated the register. A stablecoin position moved between entities without a board minute. A sale was made under a policy that was never written down.
The fix is to write the policy before the money arrives and keep the records from day one. Use one register of wallets and accounts, one approval log, and one quarterly report against the limits. Each can be checked by someone who was not in the room.
How Alcyone approaches it
Alcyone’s view is that the treasury belongs in the launch plan, not after it, because the token’s supply schedule and the treasury’s selling needs share one calendar. In one engagement on a major Layer-1, the first token project launched on the chain put about $10M into vesting. Alcyone’s strategy and growth advisory (opens in new tab) builds the plan with a named owner for every part, and quarterly reporting by the same partners continues after launch. There is no obligation to use TrustSwap products.