I just looked through a project’s latest treasury spending report, and it’s pretty interesting.

It’s not about how much they spent—it’s about where the money went. For example, in some projects, more than half of their quarterly spending is “ecosystem incentives” and “marketing,” but actual on-chain activity metrics and TVL didn’t really move at all. So who exactly are these “incentives” incentivizing? I’ve seen several similar cases, and in the end the token price drops faster than anyone else’s.

On the other hand, projects that regularly publish milestones—for instance, posting a new contract optimization every few months, or adjusting how fees are allocated—may not have big moves, but at least you can feel that someone is watching the code and the data, not just selling promises.

Lately, people have been complaining about MEV and ordering fairness. To be honest, some projects haven’t even figured out basic transaction ordering, yet they start talking up what “the future of decentralized finance” looks like—it’s pretty contradictory. It’s better to have teams like those that genuinely keep an eye on the treasury and work on real governance improvements: it looks slow, but it’s solid.

Anyway, based on my own observations, whether the team is actually doing serious work is more reliable to judge by how they spend money and how they explain where that money goes, than by whatever slogans they shout.