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.
Four parameters describe nearly every schedule in use:
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.VestingWallet implements a straight linear curve and takes only beneficiary, startTimestamp and durationSeconds.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.
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.
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.
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.
The same asymmetry can be bought outright. When Lido placed 2% of LDO supply with strategic funds in 2022, the terms stated that the tokens would be "unlocked" with "full voting power … granted immediately upon closing of the sale" – buyers paying a 50% premium above a 7-day average for a governed position with nothing vested, while contributors on the same cap table waited out their cliffs. See OTC placements and market-maker loans.
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. A Hedgey on-chain plan blurs even that test: it moves unvested tokens into a per-plan vault that delegates them through the token itself, so a governor that reads only balances still counts them. See token-weighted voting for how that weight is counted, and how DAOs fail for what happens when it concentrates.
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.
The industry has converged on a handful of answers, none of them complete.
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.
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 – the founder is paid a seigniorage skim on each trade instead of a stake set aside in advance. The full supply of 100 billion tokens is created once, when the caper is, straight into the bonding curve’s own inventory, and the token carries no mint or burn role afterwards (CaperDao::new in contracts/core/src/caper_dao.rs). Nobody holds any of it at genesis. A buy releases tokens from that inventory and a sell returns the tokens it retires, so what the market holds is what the market has bought, and nothing is held back to be 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 every buy and every sell at a rate that starts at the collateralization peak (1 in the deployed logic, so 100% of a trade) when the caper is empty and falls as the curve fills: half the peak by 1.99% of the curve cap sold, 1% by 21.4%, and a halving every 20% of the cap after that. The slice is divided three ways: 49.5% to the caper’s own treasury, in XRD; 50% to the founder, 90% of that in XRD and 10% in the caper’s own token; and 0.5% to the Commons, which is $CAPER’s own treasury, in tokens.
The XRD part is a share of the XRD the trade moves through the curve (paid out of the payment on a buy, out of the payout on a sell), and the token part a share of the tokens the trade moves (the tokens released on a buy, the tokens handed in on a sell) (buy_leg and sell_leg in contracts/logic/src/lib.rs). Because the peak is fixed in the contract, the founder’s take is bounded per trade: at most 45% of the curve XRD a trade moves and 5% of its tokens. It is not bounded as a share of supply. A sell pays its token leg in tokens that already circulate, so trading through a young caper keeps paying the founder on both legs. 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. The one case where an inherited schedule still has to be dealt with is a project that arrives with a token already issued, which migrating an existing token sets out step by step.
Members get their liquidity from the same place: exit is available at any time to a member who has cast at least one ballot, and the share it pays is the member’s canonical voting weight – the combination of tokens held and vote tokens earned – one per ranked ballot cast, and none from trading – 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.
VestingWallet and VestingWalletCliff – the reference implementation of a linear vest with a cliff.