Token unlock

An unlock is a state change, not a transaction

Mechanically, an unlock moves tokens from the locked portion of a bucket into the beneficiary's claimable balance. On most vesting contracts the beneficiary then has to call a release function to actually take them, which means the tokens can sit vested and unclaimed indefinitely.

So an unlock calendar tells you what became sellable, not what moved. Four states are worth tracking separately: locked, vested but unclaimed, claimed and held, claimed and sold. Collapsing all four into a single circulating supply figure is the most common analytical error in this area, and it produces both false alarms and false comfort.

The market does not wait to find out which state a holder chose. It cannot distinguish intent from capacity, so a wallet that suddenly holds fifty million liquid tokens creates overhang whether or not the holder has any plan to sell. That is why announcements about recipients committing to hold rarely change anything.

Arbitrum, 16 March 2024, with the numbers

The most fully documented unlock event in the category. Arbitrum's team, contributor and investor tokens vest over four years from 16 March 2023, with the first unlock exactly twelve months later and monthly unlocks after that, all stated in the project's own documentation.¹

On the date, 1,111,750,000 ARB unlocked, worth about $1.24 billion at the prevailing price of $1.12, equal to 87 percent of the token's then-circulating supply of 1.275 billion.² Against the 10,000,000,000 total supply the same tranche was 11.2 percent.³ Two ways of describing one event, and the gap between 11.2 percent and 87 percent is exactly why the denominator has to be stated every time.

Add the two figures and circulating supply moved from roughly 1.275 billion to roughly 2.387 billion in a single day. That arithmetic was available to anyone from the day the terms were published, which is the useful part. A twelve month cliff on a four year vest banks a quarter of the bucket behind a gate, and a quarter of a large bucket is a large number.

A second dated event, and why one example is not enough

Aptos unlocked roughly 24.8 million APT on 12 November 2023, an event CoinDesk reported at around $103 million two months in advance.⁴ The dollar figure moved between the report and the date, as dollar figures attached to future unlocks always do, so treat the USD number as time-of-report and the token count as the durable one.

Two documented events are two data points. We are not going to give you an average unlock size or an average price impact, because no cross-project dataset supports one, and the figures that circulate for both are unsourced. What the named events establish is the mechanism and the order of magnitude these things can reach, not a benchmark you can plan against.

Where the calendar comes from, and what it misses

Two named dashboards aggregate vesting contract data into per-project unlock calendars: Token Unlocks and DefiLlama's unlocks page.³⁵ Both are live, both are widely used, and both are downstream of what the project disclosed. A schedule enforced by a multisig rather than a contract shows up in a dashboard only if someone typed it in.

What the calendars do not carry is the rest of the supply picture. Emissions to validators or liquidity programs, treasury spending, buybacks, and market-maker loan returns all change float on their own timetables. A month showing a small unlock can still be a heavy supply month once those are added.

For your own project, the calendar is an output of the model rather than a substitute for it. Build the month-by-month table across every bucket, then compare it to what the public dashboards show. Where they disagree, the disclosure is wrong, and fixing that is cheaper than explaining it later.

What to publish, and when

Publish the full schedule before the token generation event, with contract addresses. The information is going to be reconstructed from chain data regardless, and a project that publishes first is read as forthcoming while a project that publishes second is read as reacting. That asymmetry is free to capture and expensive to lose.

Then keep the disclosure current through the schedule's life, including the boring months. Projects that only communicate around large unlocks train their holders to treat any communication as a warning.

The design work sits upstream of all of it. Unlock dates are set when the cliffs and durations are set, so the moment to prevent a punishing calendar is during term negotiation, not during the week the tranche lands. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any token.