Align incentives
Founders and early investors get paid in tokens. If they can sell everything on day one, their upside detaches from the protocol’s future. Vesting makes their payday depend on years of continued success.
Why lock tokens at all?
Prevent supply shocks
Dumping 40% of supply into a thin launch-day order book craters price. Metering unlocks over 24–48 months keeps sell pressure predictable — markets can absorb 2%/month; they cannot absorb 40%/day.
Signal commitment
A public, on-chain vesting contract (on Solana: token-lock programs like Streamflow, Bonfida vesting, or Squads-managed escrows) is verifiable proof the team cannot rug the allocation.
Filter tourists
A cliff — a period with zero unlocks — means someone who quits in month 4 of a 12-month cliff walks away with nothing. It is the crypto version of the startup one-year equity cliff.
The vocabulary:
TGE unlock = % of the allocation liquid at the Token Generation Event (day 0). Cliff = months of total lock after TGE. Linear vesting = the remainder released in equal monthly slices. A typical team allocation: 0% TGE · 12-month cliff · 36-month linear. A typical community airdrop: 100% TGE or a short 3–6 month vest.
The 3D unlock-curve visualizer
Each bar is one month of circulating (unlocked) supply. Lime = already unlocked, the magenta ghost wall = still locked. Drag to orbit. Move the sliders and watch the staircase rebuild.
Unlocked / circulating
Locked remainder
Cliff marker
Drag with mouse or finger to rotate · chart re-derives on every slider move
—Unlocked at TGE
—Monthly unlock (post-cliff)
—Circulating at month 12
—Fully unlocked at
Off: linear vesting begins after the cliff. On: tokens accrue from day 0 but are claimable only after the cliff — so the cliff month unlocks a lump sum.
Presets
The math, exactly
The unlock function
Let T = total allocation, u = TGE fraction, c = cliff months, v = vesting months. Remainder R = (1−u)·T.
Mode A — vesting starts after cliff (default):
unlocked(m) = u·T for m < c, thenu·T + min(1, (m−c)/v) · R for m ≥ c. Fully unlocked at month c+v.
Mode B — accrual from TGE, claimable after cliff:
unlocked(m) = u·T for m < c, thenu·T + min(1, m/v) · R for m ≥ c. The cliff month releases (c/v)·R at once; fully unlocked at month max(c, v).
Worked example (defaults): T = 100M, u = 10%, c = 6, v = 24, Mode A.
TGE:
Months 1–5: still 10M (cliff).
From month 6:
Month 12:
Month 30:
TGE:
0.10 × 100M = 10M liquid.Months 1–5: still 10M (cliff).
From month 6:
R = 90M vests at 90M / 24 = 3.75M / month.Month 12:
10M + (6/24)×90M = 32.5M (32.5% circulating).Month 30:
10M + 90M = 100M — fully unlocked.
Milestone table (live — follows your sliders)
| Month | Newly unlocked | Cumulative | % of total |
|---|
Analysts read this table in reverse: “what % of supply hits the market in the next 90 days?” Large single-month rows (cliff chunks, Mode B) are the classic unlock-event dates that traders mark on calendars.
One primitive, four ops jobs
Investor & team locks
Exactly the curves above, enforced by an on-chain escrow that streams or drips tokens to a wallet. No multisig member can accelerate it.
Airdrops
An airdrop is just vesting with u = 100% — or, increasingly, u = 20–30% plus a short linear tail to discourage instant sell-offs by farmers.
Payroll & streaming
Contributor pay is a vesting schedule with a tiny period: continuous streaming is linear vesting where the “month” shrinks to seconds. Cancellable streams = vesting with a revoke key.
Circulating supply reporting
Market cap = price × circulating supply — which is literally unlocked(m) summed across every allocation’s schedule. Get vesting math wrong and your FDV-vs-mcap story is wrong everywhere.