A new report shared with the Investing News Network by Keyrock, Safe and DLResearch analyzes how large crypto organizations are managing their digital wealth.
A study of 25 major protocols’ balance sheets, including Aave, the Ethereum Foundation, Lido and Uniswap, found that the vast majority of the recorded US$5.6 billion — 93 percent — is currently sitting idle without earning income.
As the sector professionalizes, a so-called “sophistication gap” has emerged between the tools available and the strategies currently deployed. The report’s author, Ben Harvey, argues that investors and stakeholders are recognizing that the way capital is structured, deployed and governed is more important than token accumulation.
The idle wealth problem: Why crypto treasuries are leaving millions on the table
In the report, Harvey explains that the median protocol allocates just 7 percent of its assets to income-generating positions, despite resembling mid-sized financial institutions in scale.
This lack of productivity is compounded by extreme concentration. Approximately 80 percent of aggregate treasury value is held in the protocol’s own native governance tokens. This creates a cyclical trap: balance sheets look healthy during bull markets, but collapse during downturns when the protocol is most in need of operational funding.
Harvey posits that annual income could increase to over US$84 million from US$6.6 million if funds were used to earn yield by employing advanced financial tools such as lending, staking and options.
So why are crypto treasuries leaving so much on the table?
According to the report, treasury leaders attribute it to “governance inertia,” or an avoidance of active management to prevent backlash from token holders — diversifying away from a native token often requires selling it, which can create downward price pressure and negative market signals.
However, the report also highlights several key benefits of covered calls, which Harvey describes as the “highest-leverage intervention available” for organizations that want to earn money without losing control of their tokens.
He points out that organizations can set very high strike prices, lowering the probability of forced selling, allowing them to collect immediate cash while keeping their long-term holdings intact.
He uses Uniswap as an example, calculating that if the protocol used covered calls on just 20 percent of its holdings, it could generate US$9.6 million in monthly income, a difference in annual yield of +11 percent.
Harvey notes that earning income through covered calls is much easier to explain to token holders than selling the token, making it a more attractive option for leadership teams facing governance pressure.
Another reason suggested is simply a conservative risk tolerance, often due to concerns over smart contract exploits or counterparty risks learned from earlier, more experimental phases of DeFi.
One example that comes to mind is the Yam Finance collapse in August 2020. In that instance, a simple bug in an unaudited smart contract rendered a US$400 million protocol ungovernable within 48 hours, serving as a permanent warning to treasury managers about the lethality of experimental code.
Bridging the sophistication gap
While concerns following 2020-era exploits remain, the report goes on to argue that the infrastructure for managing funds has undergone a massive institutional upgrade.
The report highlights Aave as a primary example of this maturity; the protocol has managed peak values exceeding US$20 billion without a single loss to smart contract exploits since its 2020 inception.
Specifically, the emergence of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), such as on-chain US treasuries and hard assets like gold, has been a game changer. RWAs allow protocols to earn virtually risk-free traditional yield without venturing into the complex and often recursive yield loops that defined early DeFi.
By moving idle capital into these safe-haven assets, protocols can build a stablecoin buffer that protects their operations even when their native token is crashing.
Additionally, new protocol architectures like Morpho V2, which allows treasuries to compartmentalize exposure into specific lending pools that match their risk appetite, have ushered in a new era of risk isolation. Standards like ERC-4626 have also reduced integration friction, allowing treasuries to interact with multiple protocols via secure interfaces.
With the industry moving away from experimental code toward tried-and-tested tools that provide the security treasury managers have long craved, the sophistication gap is beginning to close. This shift has been bolstered by the increased regulatory certainty provided by the GENIUS Act and the forthcoming CLARITY Act.
Looking ahead: A regime shift
The professionalization of treasury management is expected to become a major differentiator for token valuations. Investors are beginning to critically assess how protocols manage their finances, favoring those that can fund development through a sustainable funding model that doesn’t rely on selling tokens into a bear market.
The report identifies a small cohort of winners already successfully navigating this shift:
- Aave, for reducing native token concentration to 41 percent and maintaining a 33 percent stablecoin buffer.
- Gnosis, for its active diversification and strategic use of Gnosis Pay to drive ecosystem utility.
- Lido, for successfully managing massive liquid staking operations while maintaining high security standards.
In the coming year, idle capital will likely be viewed as a sign of mismanagement. As the “HODL” era fades, the protocols that master capital efficiency will be the ones that survive the next market cycle.
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Securities Disclosure: I, Meagen Seatter, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
