A vesting schedule is a promise about when tokens that already exist become usable by the person they were granted to. A token unlock is that promise coming due. Almost every DAO token in circulation was launched with one: a genesis allocation is carved up between the community, the treasury, the team and the investors, and the last two categories are put behind a clock so that the people closest to the project cannot sell into the first week of trading.

The schedule is usually treated as a market fact – a date on a calendar that traders watch and everyone else ignores. For a DAO it is a governance fact first. An unlock does not create tokens; it changes who can move them, and in most designs the votes attached to those tokens were never locked in the first place. That gap between voting and vesting is where the interesting failures live, and it is the reason this page sits alongside airdrops and tokenomics rather than in a trading section.

The anatomy of a schedule

Four parameters describe nearly every schedule in use:

• Start. Usually the token generation event (TGE), sometimes a contributor’s start date, occasionally a date before the token existed.
• Cliff. A period during which nothing releases at all. OpenZeppelin’s VestingWalletCliff is explicit that the cliff “not only makes the schedule return 0, but it also ignores every possible side effect from calling the inherited implementation” – the cliff is a hard gate, not a delayed start.
• Duration and cadence. After the cliff, tokens release continuously (per second, per block), in steps (monthly), or in a shaped curve. The base VestingWallet implements a straight linear curve and takes only beneficiary, startTimestamp and durationSeconds.
• Revocability. Whether the granter can claw back the unvested remainder if the recipient leaves. Sablier streams are cancelable by design: “If at any point during April Alice wishes to get back her tokens, she can cancel the stream and recover what has not vested yet.”

Those four knobs generate a surprisingly large family of shapes. Sablier’s Lockup shapes enumerate ten in production use, including an unlock cliff for “companies who want to distribute tokens to their investors using a cliff followed by linear vesting but also want to unlock some liquidity at the beginning,” and a backweighted shape in which “little vests early on, and large chunks vest towards the end.” The choice between them is a real design decision with real distributional consequences, but the industry default remains the venture-capital shape imported wholesale from equity: one-year cliff, four-year total.

The knob that matters most is the one that does not appear in any of those parameters: whether the schedule is enforced by a contract at all. A vesting contract is a public, checkable object. An off-chain lockup agreement between a foundation and an investor is a promise, and the only evidence a DAO ever gets that it was honoured is the absence of selling. Where a project publishes vesting contract addresses, the schedule is auditable; where it publishes only a pie chart, it is not.

An unlock is not an emission

The two get conflated constantly, and they are different events with different victims. An emission mints new tokens and dilutes everyone proportionally. An unlock mints nothing – the tokens were counted in total supply from day one – and dilutes nobody. What it changes is the float: the quantity that can actually be sold.

Arbitrum runs both, which makes it a clean illustration. The 10 billion ARB minted at genesis is fixed except for governance-authorised inflation: new ARB “can be minted at a rate of 2% of its supply per year at most, with the first of these mints becoming eligible on March 15, 2024” (Arbitrum Foundation). That is the emission. Separately, the 26.94% held by team and contributors and the 17.53% held by investors were locked from the start and release on a schedule. That is the unlock, and it moves roughly 4.4 billion tokens from the “exists but cannot move” column to the “can move” column without minting a single one.

This is why fully diluted valuation and market capitalisation diverge so violently in the first years of a token’s life, and why a low float at listing is not the bullish signal it is often read as – it is a statement about how much supply has yet to arrive. See token valuation for what that does to price discovery, and token velocity for what it does to the demand side.

What real schedules look like

Two canonical examples, both fully documented by their issuers.

Uniswap (September 2020). Of 1 billion UNI, the launch post allocated “21.266% to team members and future employees with 4-year vesting,” “18.044% to investors with 4-year vesting,” and “0.69% to advisors with 4-year vesting,” against 60% to community members. The community share was itself released on a schedule – the governance treasury received 43% of total supply across four years, front-loaded 40/30/20/10. After year four, “a perpetual inflation rate of 2% per year will start.” Note what that combination does: for four years the dominant supply event is unlocking, and only afterwards does dilution take over.

Arbitrum (March 2023). The published supply table gives 35.28% to the DAO treasury, 26.94% to team and contributors, 17.53% to investors, 11.62% to the airdrop, 7.50% to the Foundation and 1.13% to DAOs building on Arbitrum. “The team, contributor, and investor tokens unlock over a 4 year period, starting from 16 March 2023,” with the first unlock on 16 March 2024 and monthly thereafter. The Foundation’s own tranche is on a different shape entirely: four years from 17 April 2023, unlocking every second. One organisation, two schedules, and only one of them produces a headline date.

The contrast is the practical lesson. A per-second stream and a monthly step release identical quantities over identical horizons, but the monthly one manufactures twelve scheduled events a year at which a large quantity becomes sellable simultaneously. The cadence, not the total, is what creates the event.

Locked stock still votes

Here is the part that a supply-side reading misses entirely. Vesting locks transfer. It does not, by default, lock voting power, and several major governance frameworks deliberately preserve the vote precisely so that locked holders can participate.

Element’s Council protocol makes the intent explicit in its Vesting Vault specification: “Grant holders should be able to vote and delegate votes with their locked tokens,” and the vault exists so that “community members can vote with vested but unclaimed tokens and unvested tokens.” The reasoning is defensible – a contributor with a four-year grant arguably has more long-term exposure than someone who bought yesterday, and disenfranchising them for four years would hand governance to the float. But it has a consequence worth stating plainly:

In a DAO with a standard four-year insider vest, insiders hold their full voting weight from day one and acquire their liquidity later. Control is not vested. Only the exit is. That inverts the alignment story usually told about vesting, which claims the lock keeps insiders committed. What the lock actually does is separate the moment they can decide things from the moment they can leave – and it puts the deciding first.

Two failure modes follow. The first is quiet: a governance token whose voting distribution is far more concentrated than its circulating-supply distribution suggests, because the locked tranches vote and the float is scattered across thousands of small holders who mostly do not. Any turnout analysis run against circulating supply rather than against total voting power will overstate how decentralised the electorate is. The second is sharper: as a cliff approaches, the interests of a large voting bloc and the interests of the protocol can diverge for entirely mechanical reasons – a holder about to become liquid has a different view of a proposal that affects near-term price than one who does not. This is the same coupling problem vote-escrow designs attack from the other direction, by making the lock a condition of the vote rather than an accident alongside it.

The measurable version of the question, for anyone auditing a DAO: does the governance contract read balances, or does it read a vesting vault as well? If the latter, circulating supply tells you nothing about the electorate. See token-weighted voting for how that weight is counted, and how DAOs fail for what happens when it concentrates.

The cliff as a scheduled event

Because a schedule is public and pre-committed, an unlock is one of the few genuinely predictable events in a crypto market – which means it is priced, positioned around, and hedged well in advance. The size is not marginal. Tokenomist’s 2025 review puts “$97.43B released throughout the year” across tracked tokens, split $18.77B to insider allocations and $78.66B to community, ecosystem, treasury and liquidity sources. Insider vesting is therefore a minority of the flow by value – roughly a fifth – but it is the concentrated fifth, and the fifth that arrives on named dates. The review notes cliff unlocks were “heavily concentrated in the first half of 2025,” while linear unlocks were “dominated by high-circulation ecosystem tokens.”

Care is warranted with the causal claim that usually accompanies these numbers. The event is known months ahead, so any price effect that survives is a statement about market depth and about who is willing to take the other side, not evidence that unlocking is destructive per se. A schedule that releases the same quantity continuously produces no event to trade against at all. The design question is not whether to release insider tokens – they were granted – but whether to release them in a shape that creates a coordination point.

For a DAO treasury, the operational consequence is concrete: an unlock calendar is a liquidity calendar. Any treasury holding its own token, running a buyback, or planning a large denominated payment should know where its own insider unlock dates sit relative to those actions. See DAO treasury management.

Design responses

The industry has converged on a handful of answers, none of them complete.

• Stream instead of step. Replace the monthly tranche with a per-second release. Arbitrum’s Foundation tranche does this, and Superfluid and Sablier both productise it. It removes the coordination point without changing the total, and it is close to free to adopt.
• Backweight the curve. Sablier’s backweighted shape vests “little early on, and large chunks vest towards the end,” which extends real commitment beyond the nominal duration. The cost is that it makes contributor grants worth less in present-value terms, so it has to be paid for in size.
• Make grants cancelable. A cancelable stream converts a grant into something closer to salary: leave early and the remainder returns to the treasury. This is standard for contributor compensation and rare for investor allocations, which is itself informative about where the bargaining power sits.
• Separate the vote from the vest deliberately. Either disable voting for unvested balances, or require locking as a condition of voting (the ve route). What is hard to defend is the accidental middle, where transfers are locked and votes are not because nobody chose either way.
• Publish the contracts, not the pie chart. A schedule is only a commitment if it is checkable. Vesting contract addresses, the cliff date, and the cadence belong in the same document as the allocation table.

All of these are refinements of the same underlying model: a fixed allocation set at launch, released against a clock. The alternative is not to have an allocation table at all, which is where the next section goes. See also progressive decentralization, which is the governance-side version of the same staged-handover idea.

How Caper approaches this

A caper has no vesting schedule, because it has nothing to vest. There is no genesis allocation, no cliff, and no calendar-gated release anywhere in the contracts. Tokens are minted on demand by a bonding curve when someone buys, so there is no pre-mined block held back from the market and released against a clock.

The founder is still paid, but the schedule that governs it is the curve rather than the calendar. A slice is taken from each buy at a rate that starts at the collateralization peak when the caper is empty and tapers linearly to zero by the time 30% of the curve cap has been sold. The slice is split in the curve’s own composition – two-thirds as XRD off the payment, one third as a share of the newly minted tokens – and the token leg is tithed 30:1, so thirty parts go to the founder and one part to the Commons, which is $CAPER’s own treasury. Because the peak rate is bounded in the contract, the founder’s token leg has a structural ceiling of 5% of supply rather than a number chosen in a spreadsheet. The founder can withdraw whatever has accrued at any time; there is no lock to wait out.

Two properties of that arrangement are worth naming against the rest of this page. First, the rate is front-loaded but the take is not: the highest share is charged when the caper is smallest, so the largest amounts arrive somewhere in the middle rather than at the start. Second, and more to the governance point, there is no date on which a large locked block becomes sellable, because nothing was ever locked. The supply that exists is the supply that has been bought.

Members get their liquidity from the same place: exit is available continuously, and the share it pays is the member’s canonical voting weight – the combination of tokens held and votes cast, not tokens alone. That closes the gap this page opens. Where a conventional schedule vests the exit and leaves control unvested from day one, a caper attaches the two to the same number and lets both run continuously. The exact formulas live on the bonding curve and voting pages.

References

• Uniswap, Introducing UNI (16 September 2020) – the genesis allocation and the four-year vest.
• Arbitrum Foundation, What is the token circulating supply? and The $ARB token: a conceptual overview – allocation table, unlock dates, and the 2% maximum annual mint.
• OpenZeppelin Contracts, Finance: VestingWallet and VestingWalletCliff – the reference implementation of a linear vest with a cliff.
• Sablier, Lockup stream shapes and Lockup overview – the ten production shapes and stream cancelation.
• Element Council protocol, Vesting Vault – voting and delegation with unvested tokens.
• Tokenomist, 2025 Token Unlocks Review – annual released value and the insider / non-insider split.