Vesting, cliffs and unlocks, and why the dates are hard to find
Locked allocations become tradable on schedules that are often partly off-chain, unaudited and subject to change, which limits what unlock data can tell a reader.
Most tokens are created in full at launch and then handed out over years. Vesting is the arrangement that governs the handing out: an allocation is held back, becomes claimable in stages, and only then can move. An unlock is a change in what can trade, not a change in what exists, and the schedules that govern it are frequently less precise and less binding than they appear.
The standard structure
A typical launch divides supply among a founding team, early investors, a foundation or comparable entity, an ecosystem or incentive reserve, and a public distribution. The first three usually carry lock-ups. The common shape is a cliff followed by linear release: nothing for an initial period, then a steady drip. The cliff exists so that a departure early on forfeits the allocation, borrowing directly from startup equity practice.
Under vesting, a cliff date produces a discrete jump in claimable units, and linear release produces a continuous trickle. The two behave differently for anyone tracking float. A single cliff can add a noticeable share of circulating supply on one day. Linear vesting adds a similar quantity over months without any single date to mark.
The categories behave differently as well, and lumping them together is the most common error in reading an unlock table. Team and investor tranches are held by identifiable parties with their own reasons to keep or convert. An ecosystem or incentive reserve is not held by a beneficiary at all; it is a budget, released by decisions about grants and programs rather than by a clock, and its release rate follows an emission schedule only to the extent that spending is planned. A public distribution is already in the market. Three of these appear on the same chart as one line labeled unlocked supply.
A further distinction separates unlocked from claimed. Where release requires a recipient to call a contract, units become claimable on the date and enter circulation only when someone claims them. Claims can lag by months, and a share of many distributions is never claimed. Issued supply as reported may therefore run ahead of what has actually moved, depending on whether the provider counts claimable or claimed units.
Why the schedule is often not knowable
Some locks are enforced by contract. Units sit in a vesting contract, the release rule is code, and anyone can read the terms and the balance. This is the good case, and it is not universal.
Other locks are contractual in the ordinary legal sense: a private agreement between an investor and an issuing entity, saying the units will not be sold before a date. Nothing on the chain reflects it. The units may already sit in a wallet the investor controls. In that situation, the published unlock schedule is a summary of private paperwork, provided voluntarily, unaudited, and subject to amendment by the same parties who wrote it.
Several further practices blur the picture. Allocations are sometimes renegotiated or extended. Foundations move units between wallets for operational reasons, and a transfer can look like a distribution. Positions are sometimes sold privately before unlock through over-the-counter arrangements, or hedged in derivatives markets, so the economic exposure has changed hands well before the units become transferable. Some recipients re-lock voluntarily. None of this appears in a schedule table.
The contrast with public equity is instructive, and it is a contrast rather than an analogy.
| Aspect | Post-IPO equity lock-up | Token unlock |
|---|---|---|
| Where terms are stated | Registration documents filed with a regulator | Project documentation, a blog post, or a contract |
| Who verifies them | Auditors, underwriters, the regulator | Often nobody |
| Insider sales afterward | Reported under a disclosure regime | Generally not reported |
| Amendment | Possible, and disclosed | Possible, and sometimes announced |
| Who the holders are | Identifiable through filings | Addresses, with identity inferred at best |
The absence of a filing regime is the structural point. In equity markets an investor learns what insiders did afterward because the rules require it. In token markets the ledger shows that an address moved units and shows where they went, which is more granular in one sense and far less informative in another, since the address is not a person until someone does the attribution work.
What unlock data supports, and what it does not
Unlock data supports statements about quantity and about the eventual base. Pending supply shows how much of the eventual total is not yet circulating. Dilution overhang expresses the units due to arrive over a forward window against the current float, which is the difference between an allocation released over a decade and one released over two quarters. Unlock overhang is the term for the general condition.
Unlock data does not support statements about what recipients will do. A cliff release to an investor who bought years earlier at a private price may be sold immediately, held indefinitely, already hedged, or already sold forward. The schedule fixes when units can move; it says nothing about intent, and treating it as a forecast of selling assumes facts nobody has.
Nor does the size of an unlock translate directly into market effect. The same quantity meets very different liquidity across assets, and a release that is small against daily trading volume is a different situation from one that is a multiple of it. Comparing scheduled units to turnover is the arithmetic that makes the two cases distinguishable, and it remains an estimate about capacity rather than about outcome. Unlocks are also public, dated, and visible to everyone who looks.
Checking a schedule
Where units sit in an on-chain vesting contract, the terms are readable and the balances verifiable, and an unlock either happens or does not. Where the schedule rests on documentation, it inherits the reliability of that documentation, and its provenance is worth knowing: a table in a founding document written years ago has often been superseded. Schedules that specify a month but not a day, or a quarter, are common, and a range is what such a source can honestly support. Where a project publishes no schedule and holds a large undistributed insider allocation, the absence is itself a fact about the asset.
The supply pages show pending supply and forward unlock windows where the underlying schedule is documented, with the source labeled, and methodology explains how unverifiable schedules are handled. The next lesson uses these figures in the ratio that most often misleads: fully diluted valuation.