What a treasury is marked at, and what it would have returned

A project’s treasury usually contains two kinds of thing: assets it raised or earned, such as ETH and stablecoins, and its own token, which it issued. The first kind can be spent. The second can be spent only by selling it into the same market the project’s other holders rely on.

The quoted total treats both alike. Members voting on a budget, or investors reading a quarterly update, see one figure and reasonably take it as the amount available. The treasury’s own stewards usually know better, and have no neutral way to show the difference.

A fund with an early allocation has the same problem from the other side: an asset marked at the quoted price, reported to its own investors, that could not be turned into that sum.

Nothing here is a criticism of that treasury. It is how the arithmetic comes out for almost any organisation with a large amount of its own token, and a measurement is the first step in reporting it plainly.

A Realizable Value Statement of a treasury address gives the quoted total, the quoted total of what we could measure, and what selling each of those would have returned. Every asset has its own row saying how it was measured, and what could not be measured is counted.

Because it is dated and never recomputed, a statement taken at each quarter end makes a series: the same treasury, measured the same way, over time. That is something a team can publish, or a fund can attach to a report, with a link anyone can check.

The figures are the ones anyone gets from the free tools at the same moment. A team that buys a statement of its own token gets no better number than a stranger would, which is what makes it usable in front of people who have reason to doubt.

Where the treasury is one address, or a few, a Realizable Value Statement of each is the fuller record: $12 an address, read on every chain we cover.

Where one token is spread over many wallets, a multisig and a vesting contract, or kept with a custodian, add the amounts up and order a Position Statement of the total: $12. It measures the whole of it as one sale, which separate address statements cannot, and it shows the exchange order books beside the on-chain figure.

A statement does not confirm that the organisation controls the address or has the amount; it does not check liabilities, vesting or lock-ups; and it is not an audit or a valuation. It says nothing about the project.

It also cannot be improved by paying. We do not sell a better figure, a ranking or a favourable word, to the team or to anyone else, and a statement carries no logo or claim beyond what was measured.