With the current bull market, DeFi projects hold now relevant treasuries concentrated in their governance tokens (UNI, COMP, etc). Source: https://open-orgs.info/ I see these community treasuries as the equity of a startup or a company. They can be used to incentivize people's contributions to improving the project’s ecosystem. They can be distributed in the form of grants, liquidity mining or by funding working groups for example (“startups” within the community).