Linear vesting releases a bucket's tokens in equal amounts per unit of time across the vesting period, rather than in lumps or irregular tranches. It is the default shape for team and investor buckets, partly by preference and partly because the standard audited vesting contract implements linear release and nothing else. What varies is the unit of time, and that variance decides what a holder can actually claim on any given day.
Linear on a term sheet usually means monthly steps. Linear in a vesting contract usually means continuous per-second accrual. The words are identical, the claimable balance on a given day is not, and only one of them is what the contract enforces.
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What equal increments means once it is in a contract
OpenZeppelin's VestingWallet is the reference implementation most vesting deployments either use directly or copy. It stores a beneficiary, a start timestamp and a duration, computes the vested amount as strictly proportional to elapsed time, and exposes a release function the beneficiary calls to claim whatever has vested.1 Elapsed time means block timestamp, so accrual is effectively continuous rather than monthly.
A monthly tranche schedule is a different mechanism wearing the same label. Nothing accrues between release dates, the claimable balance sits flat for a month, then steps up. In practice this is either a custom contract with a discrete schedule or a multisig making batch transfers, and the second version is a promise rather than an enforced constraint.
Work the numbers. A 36,000,000 token bucket vesting linearly over 36 months releases 1,000,000 tokens per month. On day 45, a monthly tranche schedule has released one tranche and the holder can claim 1,000,000 tokens. A continuously accruing contract has vested one and a half months, so the holder can claim 1,500,000. Half a million tokens of difference, produced entirely by a parameter nobody discussed.
Streaming protocols push the granularity to the second
Sablier creates a stream with a start timestamp, an end timestamp and a deposited amount, and the claimable balance accrues continuously per second between the two.2 Superfluid expresses the same idea as a flow with a rate denominated in tokens per second, updating recipient balances continuously without a recurring transaction.3 Both are audited, both are live, and both make per-second linear vesting a configuration rather than a build.
The operational argument for streaming is that it removes the release event entirely. There is no monthly transaction to schedule, no multisig ceremony, and no date on which a visible tranche moves. The supply arrives at a constant rate that anyone can compute from the contract.
The argument against is that continuous accrual gives holders a sellable balance from day one of the vest, so a design relying on friction to slow selling loses it. If that friction was load bearing, the answer is a cliff or a longer duration, not a coarser cadence. Cadence is a bad substitute for structure.
Vested is not claimed, and claimed is not sold
The release function is a pull, not a push.1 Tokens can sit vested and unclaimed in a contract indefinitely, which means an unlock calendar tells you what became claimable, not what actually moved to a wallet, and certainly not what reached an exchange.
Four distinct states are worth tracking separately: locked, vested but unclaimed, claimed and held, claimed and sold. Most analysis collapses all four into circulating supply and then misreads the result. A large vested balance nobody has claimed is overhang that has not moved. It still prices, because capacity prices, but it is a different situation from tokens already sitting on an exchange.
This is also why comparing a project's published vesting schedule against onchain wallet balances is a genuinely useful diligence step, and one almost nobody runs. The gap between the two tells you something about holder behavior that no schedule can.
Linear is a shape, not a safety property
A bucket at 20 percent of total supply vesting linearly over 24 months adds roughly 0.83 percent of total supply to the sellable float every month, every month, for two years. That is smooth. It is not small. Teams routinely treat the smoothness as the risk control and stop there.
The number that matters is the monthly release measured against circulating supply, not against total supply, because circulating supply is what determines the depth available to absorb it. Early in a launch, when float is thin, a modest linear vest can represent a large fraction of what is actually tradable.
And linear vesting does not run in isolation. It runs alongside emissions, alongside other buckets' vests, and alongside whatever the treasury is spending. The combined monthly supply addition is the only figure the market responds to. A smooth curve on one row can still land in a month that was already carrying two others.
What to specify before the term sheet is signed
Five fields, and they take one line each. The duration. The cadence, stated explicitly as per-second, daily or monthly rather than left as the word linear. Whether accrual runs during any cliff or restarts at it. The enforcement mechanism, named down to the contract. And whether an admin key exists that can alter or revoke the schedule, because a schedule with a revoke function is a policy rather than a constraint.4
Across 100+ projects and $100MM+ in combined raises, the cadence line is the one most often missing, and it is the one that changes a holder's day-45 balance by half a million tokens in the example above. It costs nothing to write down and it is expensive to renegotiate.
Nothing on this page is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any token.
Common questions
How does linear vesting work for crypto tokens?
Tokens release in equal amounts per unit of time across the vesting period, usually after a cliff. The standard audited implementation computes the vested amount as strictly proportional to elapsed block time and lets the beneficiary claim it with a release call.1 That makes accrual effectively continuous, so a holder's claimable balance grows every block rather than jumping once a month.
What is the difference between linear vesting and cliff vesting?
They are two parameters of the same schedule rather than alternatives. A cliff is the initial period during which nothing is claimable at all. Linear vesting describes how tokens release once that period ends. Most real schedules combine them: a one year cliff followed by three years of linear release. A vest with no cliff simply starts releasing on day one.
Is monthly vesting the same as linear vesting?
Not mechanically. Monthly vesting is a step function that releases a tranche on a fixed date and nothing between dates. Continuous linear vesting accrues every second. Both are described as linear on term sheets, and on a 36 month vest of 36,000,000 tokens the difference on day 45 is 1,000,000 claimable versus 1,500,000. Specify the cadence explicitly.
Does linear vesting reduce sell pressure?
It spreads the timing rather than reducing the amount. A bucket at 20 percent of supply vesting over 24 months adds about 0.83 percent of total supply to the sellable float every single month for two years. Whether that is absorbable depends on circulating supply and market depth at the time, and on what else is releasing in the same months. Smooth is not automatically safe.
See Token Allocation and Vesting Design for how this applies in practice.
Sources
- Contracts Finance API: VestingWallet
OpenZeppelin, 2023
Audited reference vesting contract. Vested amount proportional to elapsed time, capped at the total allocation, with a pull-based release function and no milestone logic. - Sablier Protocol Documentation
Sablier Labs, 2024
Streams carry a start and end timestamp and a deposited amount, with the claimable balance accruing continuously per second rather than in discrete tranches. - Superfluid Protocol Concepts
Superfluid, 2024
Continuous money streaming primitive. A flow carries a rate denominated in tokens per second and updates recipient balances without recurring transactions. - Hedgey Community Documentation
Hedgey Finance, 2024
Vesting and lockup contracts supporting cliff timestamps, linear unlocks and per-beneficiary custom schedules, including optional immediate unlock percentages.
Last reviewed 2026-08
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