Vesting

Vesting exists because token launches have a coordination problem. If the team, early investors, and advisors could all sell their tokens on day one, they would (rationally, in many cases), and the price would collapse before any real product work got done. Vesting schedules solve this by contractually locking those tokens and releasing them slowly, usually over 2-4 years, sometimes longer.

The shape of a vesting schedule matters more than people realise. A typical arrangement has three elements: a cliff (a period at the start when nothing unlocks at all, usually 6-12 months), a linear release (tokens unlock in equal amounts over a set period, usually 24-48 months after the cliff), and sometimes a final dump-prevention tail where emissions slowly finish after the main vest. Together they force insiders to either build something worth keeping or watch their tokens trickle into a market that may or may not be there to receive them.

Vesting design is a good signal about project intent. Projects with short vesting (6-12 month linear, no cliff) are often pump-and-dumps waiting to happen. Projects with long vesting (36+ months, meaningful cliff, some alignment between team and treasury schedules) usually take the long-term seriously. NEAR’s original design had fully unlocked supply after about five years, which is why its current “99.99% circulating” status is a positive signal: all the vesting overhangs are now behind it.

The honest question when reading any project review is “what’s left to unlock, and when?” Projects halfway through their vesting schedules have a known sell-pressure overhang — you can map upcoming unlocks against the current market cap and get a rough sense of how much new supply is about to hit the market. This is why OYM’s Supply Dynamics dimension scores projects based on remaining unlock schedules rather than just current supply. Unlock-heavy projects score worse regardless of their headline tokenomics.