What is vesting cliff?

A date before which no tokens from an allocation can be claimed, after which the first tranche unlocks at once.

The structure is borrowed directly from startup equity, where a one-year cliff on a four-year grant is standard practice. Its purpose is the same in both settings: make sure a recipient who leaves in the first few months walks away with nothing.

What differs in crypto is that the tokens are liquid the moment they vest. An employee with vested shares in a private company usually cannot sell them. A recipient with vested tokens can sell them in the next block, which is why cliffs on token allocations produce a supply event that equity cliffs do not.

How it works

A vesting contract holds the allocation and releases nothing until the cliff date. On that date, the portion of the schedule that has accrued during the cliff period is released in a single step, and the remainder typically vests linearly thereafter.

That single step is the important part. A four-year schedule with a one-year cliff does not release a quarter of the allocation gradually over the first year and then continue. It releases a quarter all at once on the anniversary, then drips the rest. Team and early investor allocations are the usual holders, and the anniversary of a token generation event is the usual date.

Because the schedule is written into a contract, it is public before it happens. Anyone can read the release date and the tranche size on chain, which is why analytics services publish cliff dates months in advance and why the market has usually had time to form a view.

The size that matters is the tranche as a percentage of circulating supply, not as a percentage of total supply. A tranche worth 3 percent of total supply can be 30 percent of what is actually circulating if most of the supply is still locked.

Example

Illustrative. A project allocates 200 million tokens to its team on a four-year schedule with a one-year cliff, and 100 million tokens are circulating at launch.

For twelve months nothing releases. On the anniversary, one quarter of the allocation, 50 million tokens, becomes transferable in a single day. Circulating supply goes from 100 million to 150 million, an increase of 50 percent, from one event. The remaining 150 million then vests linearly over the following three years, roughly 137,000 tokens a day, which is a far smaller daily figure than the day the cliff landed.

Why it matters when you buy

Cliff dates are among the few things about a token that are knowable in advance, and they cluster at launch anniversaries. Checking whether one falls soon costs a minute. RampAtlas publishes unlock schedules by asset, a calendar of dates, and a ranking by near-term unlock pressure.

Related terms

• lockup vesting: the schedule the cliff belongs to
• unlock: what happens when the date arrives
• circulating supply: the figure a cliff moves
• token generation event: when the clock starts
• fdv: valuation assuming everything has vested
• private sale: whose allocations usually carry cliffs

Questions

How do I find a token's cliff date?

Start with the project's tokenomics documentation, then verify against the vesting contract on chain, which is authoritative where the documentation and the code disagree. Our unlock pages collect schedules for tracked assets.

Do recipients always sell at the cliff?

No. Some sell, some hold, some had already hedged with derivatives before the date. The schedule tells you what becomes transferable and nothing about intent.

Is a longer cliff better?

It delays the supply increase rather than removing it, and it keeps recipients committed for longer. Whether that is preferable depends on what you care about, and RampAtlas does not rank tokens on it.