What is lockup / vesting?

A schedule that prevents tokens allocated to a team, early investors, or a treasury from being sold until set dates.

Lockups are set out in a project's token distribution and are the reason circulating supply is smaller than total supply. Each release date is an unlock.

The schedule is normally published before launch, in a tokenomics section or a document filed alongside it, and then rarely read again. It is one of the few genuinely forward-looking facts about a token, because it says how much supply arrives and when, without anyone needing to forecast anything.

How it works

A distribution assigns percentages of total supply to categories: public sale, private rounds, team, advisors, ecosystem or treasury, and often a reserve for future incentives. Each category gets its own schedule, and the schedules differ substantially in the same project.

Three components define a schedule.

1. The cliff. A period during which nothing is released at all. A one-year cliff means the first tokens for that allocation arrive on the first anniversary, usually as a single large tranche.
2. The vesting period. After the cliff, tokens release gradually, commonly monthly or per block, over one to four years.
3. The enforcement. A schedule can be written into a contract that releases automatically, or it can be a contractual promise held off chain. The first is verifiable. The second is a commitment.

Team and investor allocations typically carry the longest schedules and the lowest cost basis, since private rounds bought well below the public price. Ecosystem allocations are often released faster and at the discretion of a treasury, which makes them harder to anticipate than a fixed schedule.

The economic effect is not a mystery. Supply that could not be sold becomes supply that can be, and whether it is sold depends on the holder. What can be measured in advance is the size and the date.

Example

Illustrative arithmetic. A project has 1 billion tokens. The team holds 20 percent, or 200 million, on a one-year cliff followed by 36 months of linear vesting. Circulating supply at launch is 150 million.

Nothing from the team allocation moves for twelve months. On the cliff date, one thirty-sixth of 200 million, about 5.6 million tokens, becomes transferable, and the same amount follows monthly. Against a circulating supply of 150 million, each monthly tranche is roughly 3.7 percent of what is currently in circulation. Whether that matters depends on the market's daily volume: if the token trades $2 million a day and each tranche is worth $5 million, the monthly release is more than two days of total volume.

Why it matters when you buy

Release schedules are verifiable and dated, which is why RampAtlas tracks them rather than commenting on them. The unlock calendar shows the next 90 days across tracked assets, the unlock pressure view ranks coins by how much of circulating supply arrives in the next 30 and 90 days, and per-asset schedules sit on the unlocks pages.

Related terms

• unlock: a single scheduled release date
• vesting cliff: the initial period with no release
• circulating supply: what the schedule adds to
• fdv: valuation assuming the whole supply exists
• private sale: the round with the lowest cost basis
• token generation event: when the schedule starts running

Questions

Where do I find a project's schedule?

In its tokenomics documentation, and where vesting is enforced on chain, in the vesting contract itself. The second is verifiable and the first is a statement of intent.

Does an unlock always push the price down?

It increases sellable supply, and what happens depends on whether holders sell and on how much volume the market has to absorb it. The measurable part is the size relative to circulating supply and to daily volume.

Why is circulating supply so much smaller than total supply?

Because locked allocations are excluded until they become transferable. The gap between the two figures is essentially the unvested portion of the distribution.