unlock schedules: the calendar nobody checks

many tokens launch with only part of the supply circulating. the rest sits with teams, investors and treasuries, and it arrives on dates that are often public.

as a very smart investor, i used to read the chart and skip the calendar.

the checklist

• next unlock date. when is the next release? and is that date in the docs, in a contract, or only in a post?
• size vs circulating supply. 50 million tokens means little on its own. 50 million on top of 200 million circulating is +25%.
• who receives it. team, early investors, treasury, ecosystem fund. each has different reasons to hold or sell.
• cliff or linear. a cliff means nothing unlocks until a set date. then either a chunk lands at once, or linear release starts. linear means a slice every day, week or month.
• fdv vs market cap gap. market cap = price × circulating supply. fully diluted valuation (fdv) = price × max supply, or total supply where there is no max. data sites define this differently. a big gap means a lot of supply is still to come.
• docs vs chain. a vesting contract’s parameters (beneficiary, start, duration, cliff) can be read on a block explorer. unlock trackers copy from docs and contracts, and sometimes get it wrong.

hypothetical example (made-up token, made-up numbers)

max supply is 1 billion, and all of it is already minted, so total supply = max supply here. 200 million circulate.

investors hold 50 million on a 12-month cliff that releases in full on cliff day. the team holds 100 million, vesting linearly over 24 months after that. the remaining 650 million (1,000 million − 200 − 50 − 100) sit with a treasury and an ecosystem fund, on schedules this example leaves out.

• cliff day: circulating goes from 200 million to 250 million. that’s +25% of circulating supply, but only 5% of max supply. the same unlock looks big or small depending on the denominator, so always say which one you used.
• team vesting: 100 million ÷ 24 ≈ 4.17 million per month, about 1.7% of the new 250 million circulating in the first month.
• at a made-up price of $0.10: market cap $20 million, fdv $100 million. 80% of max supply is not circulating yet.

none of this says what the price will do. it says how much supply can reach the market, and when.

where it leaks

• unlocked is not sold. recipients can hold for years. the calendar shows what’s possible, not what happens.
• locked is not always frozen. openzeppelin’s VestingWallet is ownable and ownership is transferable, so its docs note that unvested tokens can effectively be sold. that applies to that contract. other vesting contracts work differently, which is why the code matters.
• schedules change. governance votes, renegotiated deals and token migrations can move dates. a doc is a snapshot.
• a clean calendar is not a reason to buy. it means the supply side is readable. that’s all.

the boxer’s rule, which is opinion: he always knows when the next bag of food arrives. he thinks token holders should know at least that much.

who gets the tokens in the first place is covered in whitepaper red flags in 5 minutes.

nerd corner

• openzeppelin’s VestingWallet defaults to a linear curve. VestingWalletCliff returns zero until the cliff, then everything vested since the start becomes releasable at once. that’s the “chunk” version of a cliff.
• totalSupply() in eip-20 also counts tokens sitting in vesting contracts. “circulating supply” is an estimate, and each data site has its own method.
• sources: openzeppelin finance docs · VestingWalletCliff.sol

not financial advice. dyor. you can lose all of your money. interests: see /disclosure.