An unlock is the moment tokens that were previously locked, whether by a vesting contract or a project’s own policy, become transferable and join a token’s circulating supply. What it does mechanically is simple: circulating supply goes up, sometimes by a large percentage in a single day. What that does to price is not simple, and the widely quoted claim that most unlocks create negative price pressure comes from one analytics firm’s proprietary dataset that neither this page nor most readers can independently check.
Three supply numbers, and why the gap matters
Reading an unlock schedule requires separating three different figures. Circulating supply is what is actually trading right now. Total supply is everything that exists, including tokens still locked. Maximum supply, where a project has one, is the hard ceiling on how many tokens will ever be created, according to crypto.news’s tokenomics explainer, updated 26 June 2026. Bitcoin’s 21 million cap is the standard reference point for a hard ceiling, per the same crypto.news piece; many other tokens have no ceiling at all.
Fully diluted valuation, or FDV, is price multiplied by total or maximum supply rather than by circulating supply. Crypto.news illustrates the gap with a simple case: a token priced at one dollar with 100 million tokens circulating has a market cap of $100 million; if that same token has a maximum supply of one billion, its FDV is $1 billion, meaning 90% of the eventual supply is not yet in the market, per the same source. The wider that gap, the more dilution is still ahead of any buyer holding the token today.
A worked example: Arbitrum’s March 2024 cliff unlock
Arbitrum’s ARB token gives a concrete case, though every figure below was reported in August 2023, well ahead of the actual unlock date, and none of the sources held here describe what happened once 16 March 2024 arrived.
CoinDesk reported on 16 August 2023 that Arbitrum was set to release 1.11 billion ARB tokens on 16 March 2024 through a single cliff unlock, valuing the release at $1.24 billion at the ARB price of $1.12 that day, and equal to 87% of ARB’s circulating supply of 1.275 billion tokens. CoinDesk also cited a tweet from the data provider Token Unlocks that put the same release at $1.26 billion — a small but real discrepancy between two figures for the identical event, one calculated at CoinDesk’s own market rate and one from Token Unlocks’ own estimate. CoinDesk noted ARB was down 4% for the month at the time of writing, per data source TradingView.
Crypto Briefing, publishing a day later on 17 August 2023, put the same unlock at over 1.1 billion tokens and $1.24 billion, matching CoinDesk’s headline number, and added that Arbitrum’s total token supply is fixed at 10 billion. Crypto Briefing’s own calculation was that circulating supply would nearly double, from 1.275 billion to 2.375 billion tokens, once the unlock landed — a figure only Crypto Briefing reports. Crypto Briefing separately noted ARB was down 5% over the prior 24 hours per CoinGecko, a different window and a different percentage than CoinDesk’s monthly figure, which is a reminder that “ARB was down X%” depends entirely on which period and which source is being quoted.
Crypto Briefing also reported, as its own reporting rather than confirmed elsewhere in this evidence set, that Offchain Labs raised $123.7 million by promising investors over 438 million ARB tokens at an estimated $0.28 each, and that VC firms holding ARB would have been sitting on roughly 400% gains at prices prevailing in August 2023 if those prices held. Crypto Briefing put more than 50% of ARB’s supply as still locked at the time, feeding into a monthly release schedule running four years, and projected that by 2027 investor wallets would control over 17% and the team nearly 27% of total ARB supply. These figures appear only in Crypto Briefing’s reporting and have not been checked here against a primary Arbitrum or Offchain Labs disclosure.
CoinDesk added one more mechanical detail worth carrying forward: after the 16 March 2024 cliff, Arbitrum’s schedule moves to unfreezing a set amount of tokens every four weeks for four years, per a Token Unlocks tweet CoinDesk cited. CoinDesk also referenced a study by analytics firm The Tie finding that unlocks worth more than 100% of a token’s average daily trading volume tend to weigh on price — a threshold, not a guarantee, and one this page has not independently reviewed.
Cliff, linear, and hybrid: the shapes an unlock schedule can take
Tokenomics.com’s vesting guide, dated 1 February 2026, sets out the two baseline structures. Linear vesting releases equal amounts on a fixed cadence: a holder with 100,000 tokens on a 48-month linear schedule receives roughly 2,083 tokens a month, per that guide. Cliff vesting withholds everything until a fixed date, then releases a chunk at once followed by linear drip-outs; Tokenomics.com’s example is a 12-month cliff followed by 36 months of linear vesting, where 25% of an allocation vests the moment the cliff ends and the remaining 75% unlocks monthly over the following three years. Tokenomics.com states the one-year cliff is used by 85% of projects with team vesting schedules, and that linear vesting generally is used by around 70% of projects, both according to what the guide describes as industry benchmarks.
Keyrock’s analysis of vesting structures, which carries no publication date in the material reviewed for this page, describes Solana’s schedule as a hybrid: 34.9% of supply went to community and public-auction allocations through a no-cliff linear release over nine months; seed-round, foundation and validator allocations sat behind a one-year cliff and then unlocked in a single batch; and the team received 50% of its allocation after a nine-month cliff, with the remainder vesting monthly over two years. Keyrock also sets out a size scale for individual unlock events relative to circulating supply: nano (under 0.1%), micro (0.1–0.5%), small (0.5–1%), medium (1–5%), large (5–10%) and huge (over 10%).
The 90% statistic, and why one repetition is not confirmation
Keyrock’s own summary of its dataset states that across more than 16,000 unlock events it analysed, about 90% created negative price pressure regardless of size or recipient type, that team unlocks produced the sharpest average declines at around 25%, and that ecosystem-development unlocks were among the few categories with a positive average effect, at roughly +1.18%. It is worth being precise about what Keyrock’s own figures actually claim: “negative price pressure” in nine out of ten cases is not the same statement as most unlocks causing a crash. Keyrock reserves that kind of severity for one category, team unlocks, where the average decline it reports is around 25%. Keyrock also states that over $600 million in previously locked tokens enters circulation every week.
Yellow.com, publishing on 2 September 2025, reports the same set of figures: research on more than 16,000 token unlock events finding approximately 90% create negative price pressure, and over $600 million in unlocks occurring weekly. Yellow.com does not name Keyrock, or any other source, for these numbers in the article as held here, so this page cannot confirm whether Yellow.com’s figures are drawn from Keyrock’s dataset, from a shared upstream source, or from separate research that happens to land on identical numbers. The match is close enough to be worth flagging to a reader as a reason for caution, but it is not established here as one outlet simply repeating another’s study.
What this page does not tell you
This page cannot tell a reader what will happen to any specific token’s price around its next unlock. Keyrock’s 90% figure and its category breakdowns describe an average across a dataset of more than 16,000 past events; they are not a forecast for one project’s next release, and none of the sources here disclose the dataset itself, its date range, or its exact methodology.
All the Arbitrum figures in this piece — the $1.24 billion and $1.26 billion valuations, the 87% figure, the 1.1–1.11 billion token count, the 10 billion total supply — were reported by CoinDesk and Crypto Briefing on 16 and 17 August 2023, seven months ahead of the 16 March 2024 unlock date. Neither source in this evidence set reports what ARB’s circulating supply or price actually did once the date arrived, and this page does not claim to know.
A cluster of figures — Offchain Labs’ $123.7 million raise, the $0.28 estimated investor price, the 400% VC gain estimate, and the projected 2027 control percentages of 17% for investors and 27% for the team — come from Crypto Briefing alone and have not been checked against a primary Arbitrum or Offchain Labs disclosure in the material available here.
Finally, the Keyrock study that underpins the “90% negative” claim is undated in the version reviewed for this page, and its full methodology is not available to us. Treat the statistic as a described finding from one firm’s proprietary research, not as an independently replicated market law.
Sources
Every fact above is attributed to one of these reports. Where they disagree, the article says so.
