How to Calculate Runway When Your Treasury is 80% Native Token

Most founders get this wrong. If your runway calculation assumes you can liquidate your native token at current prices, you are probably overestimating by 2-3x.

When your treasury is predominantly composed of your own project token, traditional runway calculations break down. Liquidating large positions moves the market against you, and the price you see on CoinGecko today is not the price you will actually realize.

The liquidity-adjusted approach

Instead of using spot price, estimate what percentage of your token holdings you can realistically liquidate over a 30-day window without moving the price more than 15%. Most projects should assume they can access 20-40% of their native token position per month through OTC, DEX, or programmatic selling.

This gives you a more honest picture of how much time you actually have. Share this number with your investors — they will respect the transparency more than an inflated figure.

Where Vault Brief fits today

Vault Brief surfaces the nominal runway from each snapshot — total treasury value divided by trailing monthly burn — so the headline figure is consistent month to month. We don't apply a fixed liquidity haircut on the native-token position automatically (token liquidity profiles vary too much between projects to hard-code a number), but the executive summary is prompted to surface the haircut question explicitly when native-token exposure is the majority of the treasury, and you can adjust the narrative inline before sending the report.

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