BlockShield/Metrics/Token Unlock Cliffs

Token Unlock Cliffs

Upcoming vesting unlocks by token, built from a free emissions dataset. Why an incomplete calendar is cached briefly and never published as an empty market.

Drawn on the Unlocks tabAPI /api/v1/market/unlocksDefiLlama emissions datasets (open CDN, keyless)

What it measures

When previously locked tokens — team, investor, treasury and ecosystem allocations — become transferable, how many of them, and what share of circulating supply that represents.

It measures scheduled supply, not selling. An unlock is permission to sell, and the schedule says nothing about whether anyone does.

How it is built

The data comes from an open emissions dataset served from a CDN. The vendor's paid REST endpoints are deliberately avoided; the open JSON carries the full schedule, the per-category allocation and the discrete unlock events.

Stablecoins, wrapped tokens and liquid-staking derivatives are excluded from the supply-progress supplement, because their locked and circulating figures do not describe a vesting cliff.

A bounded aggregate must ANSWER, and say what it left out. Budgeting one phase of a sweep does not bound the caller — the protocol list, the price lookups and the supplement each held their own timeout, and what a caller waits on is their sum.

Partial cannot erase, including the parts that are not rows. The supplement once reached its phase with two seconds left, the source answered nothing, and hundreds of tokens published as an empty universe: a market with no locked tokens in it.

An incomplete answer is not cached as long as a complete one. A budgeted first sweep is held for minutes, not an hour, so the short calendar cannot sit in front of the full one the background refresher produces shortly after.

The calendar is served from the store and refreshed behind the caller, with its age stated. Unlock schedules move on a scale of days: an hour-old calendar is a correct calendar.

What to watch

Percent of circulating supply is the number that matters, not the dollar headline. A large unlock on a large float is a smaller event than a small unlock on a tiny one.

Cliff dates in published schedules slip, and schedules are amended. The source is the project's own published emission data, with all the reliability that implies.

A calendar that is still sweeping says so and carries its age. It never presents a partial list as the whole market.

Open the live Unlocks tab →

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Every rule above is enforced in code and pinned by a test. The doctrine they all follow — NULL is not zero, partial cannot erase, an unfinished period is not evidence — is published on the methodology page.
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