Why Crypto Treasury Operations Demand a Different Playbook

Traditional finance has built margin and collateral processes on an unstated assumption that markets close. For an equity position, firms typically snap the price once each day and calculate margin requirements from that point. But the always-on, 24/7 nature of crypto compresses that cycle dramatically. In crypto markets, the common convention is to revalue positions every 15 minutes. That means treasury teams must continuously monitor collateral levels and risk thresholds while adapting their operating model to a market that can change materially between valuation cycles. The biggest adjustment these teams face as they expand into digital assets is adapting to a market that never stops moving.

These differences cascade into many operating workflows. For example, risk platforms generate alerts throughout the day, traders continuously monitor thresholds, and teams often need to act immediately when collateral levels deteriorate. If collateral falls below required levels, firms are generally expected to cure the deficiency within roughly 24 hours. With crypto, a margin shortfall can’t wait until the next business day.

Financing presents a similar challenge. While traditional treasury operations can access deep repo, securities lending, and short-term funding markets, crypto treasury teams have fewer options. Many firms rely on 7-day or 30-day crypto repo arrangements. They continually rotate those positions because the financing ecosystem remains comparatively shallow. Continuous repricing, thinner financing markets, and 24-hour response windows push crypto treasury operations toward a far more proactive model that shapes every decision that follows.

Fewer layers to absorb risk

Traditional finance has a layered network of intermediaries that reflects the maturity of the market. But crypto markets lack this institutional buffer. They don’t offer the same complex web of clearers, central clearinghouses, exchanges, custodians, and tri-party agents to help move collateral, provide liquidity, and manage counterparty exposure. As a result, the market for digital assets has less depth and fewer lines of defense.

This difference becomes more pronounced when market stress intensifies and institutional alternatives narrow. The avenues for financing and deploying capital lack the systemic diversity available to traditional treasury operations, heightening the consequences of liquidity, collateral, and counterparty decisions.

That reality becomes particularly visible when investors seek liquidity without selling digital assets. A sizable holder of Bitcoin, for example, may prefer to borrow against the position rather than trigger a taxable sale. They might pledge or lend the asset in exchange for fiat liquidity. Such transactions provide access to capital, but they also increase the importance of evaluating counterparties and collateral arrangements.

The FTX collapse in 2022 demonstrated how consequential those decisions can become. Market participants that relied heavily on the crypto exchange discovered that a failure at a single institution could affect multiple parts of the treasury workflow at once. Suddenly, the posted collateral that was expected to be available wasn’t.

This episode heightened scrutiny of managers' custody arrangements, asset segregation, and cold-storage practices. More broadly, it reinforced a lesson that remains relevant today: firms can’t assume market infrastructure, regulators, or third parties will absorb risk on their behalf.

A unified view still doesn’t exist

Managing more risk internally requires broad visibility across collateral, financing, and margin positions. However, most firms still manage these activities through separate operational frameworks. Their traditional risk and collateral functions continue to rely on established platforms, but they often manage their digital-asset activity through a combination of desk-level tools and treasury systems.

The result is a fragmented view of exposures across the organization, making unified analysis of collateral and margin positions difficult. Until greater parity emerges between traditional and digital markets, firms will continue to piece together exposures across multiple systems and workflows.

We believe convergence will eventually arrive. Digital assets still present operational requirements that don’t fit neatly within traditional treasury frameworks. The reliance on crypto-native monitoring and risk management tools underscores the need for firms to maintain specialized capabilities alongside existing infrastructure. Until those differences narrow, these separate operating models are likely to remain a reality. For now, however, the need for a unified view is clearer than the path to achieving it.

Bridges form before full convergence

Although full convergence is still a long way off, we’re watching bridges between traditional finance and digital assets take shape. Stablecoins, deposit tokens, and tokenized cash are attracting growing attention from treasury teams because they address the common challenge of moving value efficiently across markets with different infrastructure and operating under different rules and settlement standards.

Right now, stablecoins are the most visible example. A recent research note found the stablecoin market hit an all-time high on April 11, 2026, with a total market cap of more than $318 billion. This figure marks a roughly 34% year-over-year increase from about $238 billion in April 2025.ⁱ For firms operating in these markets, they provide an always-on settlement asset that can operate on the same infrastructure as the underlying assets themselves. At the same time, traditional financial institutions and market infrastructure providers are exploring tokenized alternatives designed to improve the speed and flexibility of settlement processes.

Recent initiatives around tokenized collateral management and the emergence of deposit-token models also suggest the conversation is shifting from experimentation toward practical operational use cases. While the approaches differ, they share a common objective of reducing friction between traditional and digital financial systems.

None of this guarantees convergence until regulatory frameworks answer important questions surrounding market structure and operating requirements. But the direction of travel is becoming clearer. As the industry continues to work toward building a single crypto operating model, digital infrastructure is steadily expanding the connections between these two siloed asset classes and the way they’re used for liquidity.

Build for the market that exists, not the one we want

What’s clear today is that digital assets are becoming a larger part of institutional portfolios. But the model of operating alongside traditional markets rather than within them leaves firms stuck in the middle, needing solutions to manage both. The future challenge is building an all-of-the-above operating model that would ideally support continuous markets, new forms of collateral and financing, modernized settlement infrastructure, and an increasingly complex mix of traditional and digital exposures.

The driving forces are supply and regulation. As stablecoins, deposit tokens, and tokenized collateral continue to mature, regulatory frameworks are also evolving, and institutional participation is expanding. But that split suggests the pace of adoption is unlikely to be uniform. Complexity will remain a defining characteristic of these developing markets for the foreseeable future.

Under those conditions, the best approach is to spend time building capabilities for managing both environments as they exist today. Trying to predict when full convergence will arrive would end up creating false starts. The organizations best positioned for that future will be the ones already investing in treasury, collateral, and risk-management capabilities that can function effectively across traditional and digital markets alike.