Locked tokens come free
Most new coins have part of their supply locked: the team's, the funds', the early round's. It comes free on a schedule — and on the appointed day that slice can be sold.
- Vesting
- The schedule on which locked tokens are released: this much on this date, usually mapped out two or three years ahead.
- Cliff
- One large slice of a vesting schedule that unlocks in a single day instead of dripping out. Cliffs are what you see in the calendar.
- Float
- How many coins actually circulate right now, as opposed to how many exist on paper. A small float is easy to push up and just as easy to collapse.
- Daily volume
- How much money changed hands in a coin over a day. It lies more often than people expect: volume is cheap to manufacture, a book is not.
- Tokens in the calendar
- 180+
- Releases this week
- 12
- Next large one
- in 3 days
Why it happens
The schedule — the vesting — is public and known months ahead. This is one of the rare cases where you know for certain that on a particular day the market will be handed new supply. Demand does not appear from anywhere to meet it. The visible events are the cliffs, where one large slice comes free at once rather than dripping out daily.
But the selling does not happen on the day. Whoever received a large slice needs time: dumping all of it at once means collapsing the price on themselves. So the pressure smears out over the weeks after the date instead of concentrating in it.
Before the date the opposite tends to happen. Everyone reads the same calendar, and by the day itself many have already sold ahead of it. A date obvious to everybody rarely pays what it looks like it should — which is a general property of any event the whole market can see coming.
And the thing to count is money, not tokens. "Five percent of supply unlocked" means nothing on its own: what matters is how that compares with what the coin actually trades in a day. The same share can be invisible on one coin and lethal on another.
How people use it
- Measure the release in money against daily turnover, not as a percentage of supply.
- Look at who it goes to: an early round sitting on a large profit, or a team that usually holds.
- The date itself is the worst moment — everyone who reads calendars is already there.
Where it breaks
Dates get pushed, schedules get rewritten, and part of what comes free never reaches the market at all: it sits still, or changes hands privately. The calendar tells you tokens can be sold, not that they will be.
What we track here
- Keeps a calendar of scheduled releases across a large set of tokens, with the size of each one.
- Converts every release into money and compares it with what the coin actually turns over in a day — the same percentage is harmless on one coin and fatal on another.
- Separates a single large cliff from a slow daily drip, because only one of them is an event.
- Flags who the tokens are going to: an early round long in profit, or the team.
- A date in the calendar becomes a size you can judge instead of a percentage you cannot.
- You can see which releases are already in the price because everybody reads the same calendar.
- If you are holding through one, you know whether the pressure lands in a day or spreads over a month.