Circulating Supply, Unlocks, and the Chart You Can't See

Every price chart on your phone has the same blind spot. It draws what has already been traded and stops at the right-hand edge. It cannot draw the tokens that will be created next Tuesday, even though the date was written into a contract two years ago and anybody can look it up.

That is the odd thing about token supply. Almost nothing in this market is knowable in advance. Unlock dates mostly are.

What does circulating supply actually leave out?

Circulating supply is the count of tokens that exist and can be moved right now. It is the number that gets multiplied by price to produce market capitalisation, and it is the number most people glance at without thinking about the shape of everything excluded from it.

What sits outside it is not evenly distributed. A typical launch splits the total supply between a public float, an allocation to early investors, an allocation to the team and contributors, a treasury or foundation reserve, and a pool set aside for rewards and incentives. On day one, the traded float can be under 10% of the eventual total. The other 90% is real, allocated to specific parties, and released on a written timetable.

The gap between circulating supply and total supply is the same gap that shows up between market cap and fully diluted valuation, viewed from the supply side rather than the price side. Market cap vs. fully diluted valuation covers the valuation half of it. This article is about the timetable.

Two things follow from that timetable existing. The first is that future supply increases are scheduled rather than random. The second is that no price chart shows them, which means the chart is a complete record of the past and a systematically incomplete picture of the future.

Where do you find an unlock schedule?

Three places, in descending order of authority.

The token contract is the primary source. Vesting handled on-chain lives in a contract with the amounts and dates in it, and it is verifiable by anyone. This is slow to read and rarely something you would do on a phone, but it settles arguments.

The project's own documentation is the practical version. Tokenomics pages usually publish the allocation breakdown and the release schedule as a chart, and a project unwilling to publish either has told you something.

Aggregators are what you will actually use. DefiLlama's unlock calendar is free, public and covers several hundred protocols, listing the next unlock date, the dollar value of the release, whether it is a cliff or linear, and how much of the supply is already circulating. It is open enough that its methodology can be checked, which is more than most sources of crypto data offer. Cross-check anything material against the project's own docs, because aggregator coverage has gaps and stale entries.

The full check takes about two minutes on a phone:

1. Find the circulating share. What percentage of total supply is trading now. Under 30% means most of the supply is still ahead of you.
2. Read the next unlock date and its size. As a percentage of circulating supply, not as a dollar figure. A $5 million unlock is trivial against a $2 billion float and severe against a $15 million one.
3. Identify the type. Cliff or linear, which changes what the release means entirely. See the next section.
4. Check who receives it. Team, investors, treasury and incentive emissions behave differently once distributed, and the allocation breakdown usually says which bucket a given tranche belongs to.
5. Look at the rest of the year, not just the next date. A single unlock in isolation is less informative than the density of releases over the following twelve months.
6. Verify against the project's docs. If the aggregator and the tokenomics page disagree, the contract decides.

None of that requires a desktop or a paid data terminal, which is not true of most things people describe as research.

What is the difference between a cliff and linear vesting?

A cliff releases a batch at a single moment. Nothing, nothing, nothing, then a large tranche lands on one date. The classic structure is a twelve-month cliff after a token generation event, at which point the first slice of team and investor allocation becomes movable all at once.

Linear vesting drips. The same total is released continuously across the vesting period, usually per block or per day, so supply expands a little every day and no single date carries any weight.

The distinction matters because the two produce completely different patterns. A cliff creates a specific date that market participants can see coming, and that visibility is itself part of the dynamic: positioning happens before the date rather than on it, which is a large part of why cliff unlocks so often fail to produce the drop people expect on the day. Linear vesting produces no date at all, just steady dilution that never announces itself and never appears in any headline.

Many schedules combine both, which is the structure worth recognising. A one-year cliff releasing 25% of an allocation, followed by linear vesting of the remainder over the next two or three years. On an aggregator this shows as a single large event followed by a long flat drip, and both parts count.

There is a third pattern that catches people out: emissions with no vesting at all. Staking rewards and liquidity incentives mint new tokens continuously and are not on anyone's unlock calendar, because nothing is being unlocked. Supply still grows. If a token's inflation rate is meaningfully positive, that is dilution arriving every single day regardless of what the vesting schedule says.

Why does a fixed date matter more than most crypto news?

Because it is one of the very few things about the future that is genuinely knowable.

Nearly everything else that moves a price is a surprise by definition. An exchange failure, a regulatory decision, a protocol exploit, a macro release that lands away from expectations. You can prepare for the category and not for the event. How news moves prices covers how quickly that class of information gets absorbed, which is usually faster than a person on a phone can act on it.

An unlock is different in kind. The date exists, the amount exists, the recipient category exists, and all of it was published before you arrived. Whatever the market does with the information, the information itself is not in dispute.

Now the honest limits, because the folklore around unlocks overshoots badly. An unlock is a change in what is possible, not a transaction. Tokens moving from a vesting contract to a wallet does not mean they were sold, and recipients with long horizons frequently hold. Anticipated unlocks are also frequently priced in before the date, which is the reverse of what a person watching only the day itself would conclude. The empirical record on unlock-day price effects is mixed, and anyone claiming a reliable pattern is describing a subset of cases.

What is not in dispute is the arithmetic underneath. Supply goes up. For the price to hold, demand has to grow at least as fast. That is true whether the release is a cliff or a drip, whether anybody sells, and whether the chart reacts on the day or three weeks later.

The practical version on a phone is unglamorous. Look up the schedule once when you first read about a token, and note the dates that are large relative to the float. Simple price alerts are free and let a level sit in the background so you are not staring at a chart on a day you already know about — your first price alert covers the setup, and market cap alerts on the paid tiers watch valuation instead, which is the figure that moves when supply expands under a flat price.

The unlock calendar for the next twelve months already exists for most tokens you hold. It is the only part of next year that has been written down.