Token Unlocks & Vesting. Supply you can see coming months ahead.
Most tokens launch with a large share of supply locked and released on a published schedule to teams, early investors and the treasury. Unlike almost everything else in trading, these are known future events with known dates and known sizes.
That makes them unusually tractable. The difficulty is not finding out when supply arrives, it is that everyone else can see it too.
The market usually prices it in before the date
Because unlock schedules are public, the anticipated selling is often positioned for in advance, which means price weakness frequently appears in the days or weeks before the unlock rather than on the day itself. It is common to see an asset drift down into an unlock and then rally once it passes, which is the opposite of what a naive reading of the calendar suggests.
Token Unlocks & Vesting in a strategy
Unlock calendars are published well in advance, so a strategy can plan around them rather than react.
An unlock worth 20% of circulating supply is a different event from one worth 0.5%.
The simplest use is not trading the unlock at all, but avoiding leveraged longs into a large one.
Once known supply has cleared, the overhang that suppressed price is gone.
Stand aside into a large unlock
A risk rule rather than a trade. The edge is in not being positioned badly for a supply event you could see on a calendar.
- IFAn unlock is scheduled within the next 7 days
- ANDThe unlocking amount exceeds 5% of circulating supply
- ANDYour strategy holds or is about to open a leveraged long in that asset
Written as avoidance rather than a short because the direction is genuinely uncertain: the drop often happens before the date, and recipients frequently do not sell at all. What is not uncertain is that a large scheduled supply event raises the range of outcomes, and leverage is what turns a wider range into a liquidation. The 5% threshold exists because small routine unlocks are absorbed without trace and would otherwise keep the rule permanently active.
The original vesting schedule is usually published in the project's own docs at launch.
TokenUnlocks, CryptoRank and similar services aggregate schedules across hundreds of assets.
Where vesting is enforced by a contract, the schedule and the amounts are verifiable directly.
An unlock is not a sale
Tokens becoming transferable does not mean they are sent to an exchange, and many unlocked allocations sit untouched for years. Treating every unlock as guaranteed selling pressure will have you standing aside through moves that never came.
Be positioned before the unlock hits the market.
Paper trade it first, go live when the numbers convince you.
- Known dates
- Size relative to float
- Exposure reduction