Every token launch promises “no dumping.” Almost every token launch gets dumped on anyway. The gap between the promise and the chart isn’t bad luck — it’s usually a vesting schedule that was designed to look good in a deck, not survive contact with a market.
The problem with uniform cliffs
The industry default — one-year cliff, then linear unlock — creates a predictable supply shock exactly one year after every allocation round. Sophisticated holders know this and position ahead of it. You’re not preventing a dump; you’re scheduling one, publicly, in advance.
What we design instead
- Staggered cliffs across cohorts. Team, seed, and strategic rounds unlock on different clocks, so no single date floods the market.
- Usage-linked unlocks. A portion of team and treasury tokens unlock based on protocol milestones (TVL, active users, revenue) rather than pure calendar time — aligning insider liquidity with the thing that’s supposed to justify it.
- Unlock-day liquidity plans. Before a major unlock, we model expected sell pressure against order book depth and, where it makes sense, coordinate market-maker support or a public unlock calendar so the move isn’t a surprise.
The trade-off nobody likes to say out loud
Locking tokens longer protects price stability but frustrates early believers who took real risk. There’s no version of this that makes everyone happy — the job is choosing a structure your team can defend publicly, including to the people it locks up the longest. If you can’t explain your own vesting schedule to a skeptical Twitter thread, it’s not ready to launch.
Want your unlock schedule stress-tested before launch, not after? That’s the first thing we look at in our Tokenize program.
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