When a Crash Hits, Founders Don’t Lose Price… They Lose Time

Afsheen Jafry
Oct 12
3 min read

Crashes don’t just take your token down. They take your time — your runway, your team’s patience, and your community’s trust. Overnight, you go from product builder to firefighter on four fronts at once.

1) Runway to oblivion

Most projects keep a big part of their treasury in their own token. When the market drops 60–80%, that war-chest shrinks fast. On paper you had £40m… now it looks like £8m. Your costs don’t care.

Infrastructure: validators, RPC, storage, analytics, monitoring… all paid in fiat.
Salaries: engineers and community teams can’t live on hopium. Cut too hard and you stall… don’t cut and you run out of runway.
Growth: paid marketing and BD freeze first. The top of your funnel ices over.

Plain speak: if your treasury is 80% your own token, you’re carrying a leveraged balance sheet. Price down = runway down.

2) Managing a panic

Your Telegram, Discord and X firehose flips from cheer squad to courtroom. Every post is read as a confession. Say too little and it’s “rug.” Say too much and you trigger a bank run. Meanwhile investors want updates, partners want certainty, and your best people are quietly updating CVs.

This isn’t drama. It’s human biology plus a falling line on a screen.

3) The use-case question

When speculation leaves, real demand stands alone. In bears, DeFi TVL and NFT volume can fall off a cliff. If your core loop doesn’t solve a real job, you feel it quickly. The bear is brutal… but it tells the truth. If users only came for token upside, your product shows you now.

4) Legal and exchange overhang

Crashes invite regulators. Enforcement rises. If a major exchange or market-maker blows up, your liquidity can vanish overnight. You didn’t cause it… you still eat the risk.

What separates survivors from casualties

Here’s the boring, unfashionable kit that keeps builders alive.

A) Treasury rules written in sunshine

Hard caps on how much treasury can be in the native token.
Automatic rebalancing into stablecoins and a BTC/ETH band at preset price triggers.
A “crash budget” in multisig: 12–18 months of core OPEX in stables, ring-fenced and boring.

B) Cost architecture, not random cuts

Reserve capacity where it’s cheaper, kill vanity infra, outsource non-critical DevOps.
Keep observability, security and incident response… cut dashboards that don’t change decisions.

C) Talent triage with receipts

If you must cut, cut once… explain what survives and why.
Ship something visible within 30 days to reset morale.

D) Comms that don’t cause bank runs

Short weekly update: runway in months, OPEX band, what shipped, what’s next.
Liquidity circuit-breakers in governance: slow unlocks, pause non-critical grants, cancel buybacks.
Pre-authorise an external reviewer to verify treasury when triggers hit.

E) Utility first, narrative second

Kill features users don’t touch.
Make one job 10× better for one tight user segment… price it cleanly.
If your product only lives when the line goes up, it isn’t a product yet.

F) Counterparty maps

Keep a live list of your exchange, market-maker, stablecoin and banking exposure… plus your partners’.
Assume “someone else’s risk” can become yours within 24 hours.

A simple crash playbook

T-0 to T-72 hours

Freeze non-essential spend. Convert enough to stables for 12 months of critical OPEX.
Publish a 200-word update with dates and numbers… not vibes.
Run a counterparty risk sweep: where’s our liquidity, who holds it, any vesting/covenant triggers?
Ship one tangible fix or improvement. Momentum beats doomscrolling.

Week 1–2

Reforecast on three paths: Base… Stress… Ice Age.
Patch token incentives that leak value in a bear (over-high emissions, misaligned LP rewards).
Re-rank the roadmap to one outcome users still want in a flat market.

Week 3–4

Rent resilience: custody, fiat ramps, RPC, compliance tools.
Host a founder AMA with a third-party verifier present. Data over drama.

Why this matters

Crashes don’t choose between “visionary” and “scammer.” They choose between prepared and unprepared. Survivors pre-commit to boring rules that protect their time, team and users when screens go red. That’s how you keep building while others are explaining.

〝Volatility compresses… upside expands.〞 But only if you’re still alive to catch the next expansion.

— Afsheen JafryI make your project funding-ready |

Crypto × AI StartupsHelping founders go from idea → funded → VC-readyBridging Founders × VCs × Retail (100K+ community)

X: @afsheenjaf | Telegram: @afsheenj8