Emissions, Cliffs, and Vesting

How tokens enter circulation. Linear vesting, cliffs, milestone unlocks, and the supply overhang problem that has crushed every late-2024 and 2025 launch.

35 min · expert · part of Token Engineering & Economic Modeling

The Schedule Is the Story

If value accrual answers "why hold this token," the emission schedule answers "what is the market going to look like when more supply hits in six months." Both questions matter, but it is striking how often retail buyers focus entirely on the first while institutional desks focus mostly on the second. The reason is structural. Most crypto tokens launch with a small float (the percentage of total supply that is liquid and tradeable at TGE — token generation event). The remaining supply belongs to insiders: team, investors, advisors, future ecosystem grants, treasury, foundation. That supply is on a vesting schedule. Every unlock event releases new sellers into the market, and the relevant question for price action is whether organic demand can absorb that new supply. When demand absorbs supply, the unlock is uneventful. When it cannot, the token compresses. Several late-2024 and 2025 launches have made the supply overhang problem so visible that retail traders now openly track unlock calendars. Sites like Token Unlocks and CryptoRank publish daily unlock notifications. Treasury desks at large funds run unlock-pressure models. This lesson works through the major vesting schedule designs, the dashboards that track them, and the supply overhang problem that has become one of the defining tensions of 2024-2026 token markets.

Also in this lesson

Linear Vesting
Cliffs and Cliff+Linear
Milestone-Based and Performance Vests
Tracking Unlocks: Token Unlocks, CryptoRank, Messari
The Supply Overhang Problem (2024-2026)

Key terms

Token Generation Event (TGE): The moment a token is launched and first becomes tradeable. The TGE float is the percentage of total supply that is liquid at this moment, typically 5-15% for major 2023-2025 launches.
FDV (Fully Diluted Valuation): The market cap a token would have if all tokens (including unvested insider allocations) were currently circulating. FDV vs. circulating market cap is the primary indicator of supply overhang risk.
Float: The portion of a token's total supply that is currently liquid and tradeable. Low-float launches with high FDV are a primary structural risk in 2024-2026 token markets.
Cliff: A period during which no tokens unlock, followed by a sudden release on the cliff date. Common structures are "1-year cliff then linear" or "2-year cliff then linear," borrowed from Silicon Valley equity vesting.
Linear vesting: Tokens unlock continuously over the vesting period. If 100M tokens vest linearly over 4 years, recipients accrue roughly 274,000 tokens per day from day one.
Milestone-based vesting: Vesting tied to specific events (mainnet launch, TVL threshold, DAU target, price milestone) rather than calendar dates. Better incentive alignment but harder to design without gameable metrics.
Supply overhang: The pressure created when large insider allocations are scheduled to unlock into a market that cannot absorb them at current prices. The defining tokenomics issue of 2024-2026 for high-FDV-low-float launches.
Token Unlocks: The leading public dashboard (token.unlocks.app, run by CryptoRank) tracking vesting schedules for 1000+ tokens with daily unlock calendars and dollar values at current market prices.
Unlock pressure: The dollar value of insider unlocks over the next 30-180 days divided by average daily trading volume. A ratio above 1 implies near-certain price compression unless exogenous demand absorbs the new supply.
Unlock-adjusted FDV: Analytical framework that discounts the headline FDV by expected dilution-driven price compression over 12-24 months. A $10B FDV token with 90% supply unlocking over 2 years has a "true float" valuation closer to $1-2B.

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Educational only — not financial advice.