Unlock Calendar: How the Vesting Schedule Moves Prices

For serious tokens, supply elements are scheduled out for years: teams, funds, and treasuries receive their shares according to a vesting schedule. This schedule is a public timetable of future sellers.

Overhang mechanics

An unlock is not an automatic sale: tokens simply become available. But recipients have a cost basis many times below market and obligations to LPs - a statistically significant portion of unlocks converts into sales. The market knows this and front-runs it: price weakness often begins a week or two before the date, and the unlock day itself often passes calmly - a classic "sell the rumor".

How to read the calendar

• Size versus turnover: an unlock of 0.5% of supply is noise; an unlock equal to a month's trading volume is an event. Measure it in days of average volume.
• Recipient: early-round funds sitting on multiples of their cost basis are sellers almost for certain; a team with long vesting depends on the stage.
• Cliff versus linear: a cliff (a one-time release of a large share) hits harder than smoothed-out linear emission.
• On-chain confirmation: movement of unlocked tokens to exchanges is visible immediately - the fact of selling is verified, not guessed.

Unlock calendars are public (token unlocks aggregators, DeFiLlama). Holding a token through a major cliff without a plan is a conscious bet against the schedule. We flag significant unlocks in the feed.