Token allocation is the division of a project's total supply across stakeholder buckets: community, team, investors, treasury, and liquidity. Each bucket carries a percentage, a token count, a cliff, a vesting length, and a TGE unlock. The balance between community and insiders is the first signal a serious investor reads.
Community-first allocations with long insider vesting win the raise, hold through TGE, and attract the participants who generate real demand. Insider-heavy tables do the opposite.
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How it works
Fix total supply first, then assign a percentage to each bucket, then convert those percentages to hard token counts. The locked portion of every bucket gets a cliff and a vesting schedule. The TGE unlock percentage decides how much enters circulation on launch day.
Every one of these numbers interacts with every other. That is why allocation is modeled as a single system, not set bucket by bucket in isolation. The table has to sum to 100% with the cliffs and unlocks already accounted for.
Why it matters
Allocation is a credibility signal before it is a technical one. If team, investors, and advisors together exceed 40% of total supply, the market reads it as insiders controlling the price action. No investor relations effort fixes that optics problem once the table is public.
Common mistake
The most common failure is treating the table as a negotiating artifact instead of a design artifact. Founders assign percentages to satisfy individual asks from investors and advisors, then retrofit a vesting schedule around commitments already made.
The result is an insider-heavy table whose vesting cannot prevent simultaneous unlocks, because the percentages were never modeled as a system. Done right, allocation starts with the community bucket and works inward.
See Token Allocation and Vesting Design for how this applies in practice.
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