One thing that people who interact with treasury should really understand is the reason your investors have invested in you.
In this case, the backers wanted you to build a metaverse RPG. If they had wanted to invest in ETH, they would’ve done so themselves. So your job isn’t to make stupid bets on investments way outside your company’s lane, it’s to build the product you sold and fundraised on.
I’ve seen the same thing at nonprofits I’ve worked with. Their management teams start making riskier and riskier investments because it’s seen as “free” money in a sense because it’s all happening internal to the org and they don’t need outside fundraising. So you’ll have an org focused on public health or whatnot investing their cash reserves in foreign commercial credit.. then when that shit goes south and they need to mark their reserves down by hundreds of thousands of dollars, every other stakeholder is impacted.
I’m going to make a “white label” metaverse RPG that is easily skinned. Then every crypto scammer who promises to build one can just buy it from me for $100K. That includes playing as any of their 10,000 ugly pixel-art NFTs. For an extra $100K I’ll include a few shitty play-to-earn mechanics.
Treasury management is not straight forward though. A lot of projects raised in ETH, and decided to keep the ETH rather than locking in the dollar value they need to pay expenses in. ETH mooned and they are in a better financial position. In other cases projects raised in stablecoin, but needed ETH to pay gas, which spiked at the same time ETH mooned, resulting in millions of dollars expenses that needed coverage leaving them in a much worse position.
Not that it seems to apply to this case in particular. It looks like this guy just trousered as much as thought he could get away with.
In this case, the backers wanted you to build a metaverse RPG. If they had wanted to invest in ETH, they would’ve done so themselves. So your job isn’t to make stupid bets on investments way outside your company’s lane, it’s to build the product you sold and fundraised on.
I’ve seen the same thing at nonprofits I’ve worked with. Their management teams start making riskier and riskier investments because it’s seen as “free” money in a sense because it’s all happening internal to the org and they don’t need outside fundraising. So you’ll have an org focused on public health or whatnot investing their cash reserves in foreign commercial credit.. then when that shit goes south and they need to mark their reserves down by hundreds of thousands of dollars, every other stakeholder is impacted.