{"slug":"token-unlock","term":"Token Unlock","category":"Whales & On-Chain","definition":"A token unlock is the scheduled release of tokens that were locked at launch — allocations to the team, investors, foundation or ecosystem that vest over time. A cliff unlock releases a block on one date; a linear unlock drips continuously. Unlocks add supply that was not tradeable before, and the recipients often paid a fraction of the market price.","street":"The investors got in at $0.02 and their 40 million tokens unlock Tuesday. You are not competing with the chart; you are competing with their cost basis.","depth":["The size that matters is the unlock as a share of circulating supply, not the dollar figure: 2% of circulating hitting the market on one day is meaningful, 0.1% dripping daily is priced in. Cliffs are the events — a team cliff a year after launch, an investor cliff at month twelve — and the pattern around them is well documented: weakness into the date as holders front-run, and either relief after (if the recipients hold) or a slide (if they sell into it).","How to trade around them: know the date, the category and the share of supply before holding through it; avoid being long a coin into a cliff above 1% of supply unless the flow says otherwise; and watch what price does in the week after — recipients who did not sell on day one tend not to sell at all. Our coin pages carry the schedule when the data source is on."],"live":{"label":"Coin pages: supply, funding and the record","href":"/markets/crypto"},"related":["fdv","distribution","market-cap","dormant-supply","circulating-supply"]}