What happens when tokens unlock? Follow the supply, not just the date

Coinbase's stakeholder dashboard documentation separates vesting, meaning when a grant is earned, from lockup schedules, meaning when vested tokens become transferable or claimable. Its glossary also distinguishes claimable tokens from the balance already held in a wallet. Those distinctions matter when reading an unlock announcement.

1. 1

   Vesting

   The holder meets the schedule's conditions for an allocation.

2. 2

   Lockup expiry

   A restriction ends under the relevant arrangement. Its timing need not match vesting.

3. 3

   Claim or distribution

   An eligible allocation is actually delivered. Claimable does not mean already received.

4. 4

   Counted as circulating

   A data provider counts circulating tokens according to its own rules. Check those rules before adding unlocked tokens to the supply figure in your calculation.

5. 5

   Selling

   A holder exchanges tokens. The schedule alone provides no evidence that this transaction occurred.

Coinbase's glossary describes a cliff as an initial waiting period and a cliff percentage as the share released at that point. A release schedule may then continue through later events. Our diagram turns those terms into one deliberately simple example.

The flat opening means nothing has been released. The jump is the cliff allocation. The rising line afterwards represents our assumed continuous release of the remainder. The endpoint is the end of the complete schedule, measured from month zero, not an extra twelve months after the cliff.

Start with an allocation of 1,000,000 tokens, a three-month cliff, a twelve-month total duration, and a 25% cliff release. Immediately before month three, the released amount is zero. At month three, 250,000 tokens release together and 750,000 remain locked in this example.

Those remaining tokens release over nine months. Three months later, at month six, one third of the remainder has released: another 250,000 tokens. The cumulative total is therefore 500,000, not 250,000 plus half of the remaining allocation.

At month twelve, all 1,000,000 tokens have released. The allocation never becomes 1,250,000: the cliff amount is part of the original million, not an extra grant.

The experiment starts at the three-month cliff. Move the selected month to six and then twelve to reproduce the table. Next, change the cliff release to zero: release begins gradually after the cliff, with no initial jump. At 100%, the whole allocation releases at the cliff and the later line becomes flat.

Try a later cliff while keeping the twelve-month endpoint. The same remainder now has less time to release. Fractional selected months interpolate continuously; the table samples whole months. A real agreement with discrete monthly payments would have a staircase instead.

Consider a separate, conditional example: a dataset counts 2,000,000 circulating tokens, and you hold 10,000. Your share of that count is 0.5%. If the complete 250,000-token cliff allocation is subsequently added to the counted supply, your share becomes about 0.4444%. Your own token balance has not changed.

This calculation assumes the newly released allocation was previously excluded and is now included. If either premise is false, adding 250,000 would give the wrong answer. It also says nothing about ownership rights or the share of a business.

A CAD illustration adds another assumption: at a fixed hypothetical price of CAD 0.20, the two supply counts imply valuations of CAD 400,000 and CAD 450,000. The CAD 50,000 difference is multiplication, not evidence that CAD 50,000 entered the market. Holding valuation constant instead would require a different hypothetical price.

An eligible release is not a sale; market cap and trading liquidity answer different questions about what those tokens may be worth and how they could trade.

The experiment is an explanation of schedule arithmetic. It has no live token calendar, project allocation feed, wallet tracking, or price forecast. CAD appears only in the separate valuation example; choosing Canadian dollars does not change the token-release calculation.

• Identify the allocation and recipients. A grant-specific schedule is not automatically a schedule for the entire token supply.
• Check the starting date, time zone, total duration, cliff portion, and whether later amounts are continuous or discrete.
• Distinguish a scheduled event from evidence of completion. A claim eligibility figure and a completed distribution answer different questions.
• Check which tokens your data source counts as circulating. If you cannot confirm whether newly unlocked tokens are included, do not automatically add them to that count.