Vesting your team's tokens

What team token vesting actually does, and what it replaces

Vesting moves tokens into a contract that releases them to a beneficiary over time. Until each portion is released, it cannot be sold, transferred or moved — not by you, not by the person the allocation belongs to.

What it replaces is a sentence in a document. Almost every project tells buyers the team allocation is committed long-term. That sentence costs nothing to write and nothing to break. A vesting contract costs a fee and a signature, and breaking it is not available as an option. The difference between those two things is the entire reason buyers ask about vesting rather than about your intentions.

It also solves a problem that is genuinely yours rather than the buyer's. A large unvested team allocation sitting in a single wallet is a permanent overhang — every holder who checks holder concentration can see it, and every price move gets read through the question of whether you are about to sell. Vesting takes that question off the table by answering it in advance, publicly, with dates.

Three schedule patterns, and what each one signals

The cliff is the part buyers look at first: it is a single date before which zero tokens are claimable, and it is the cleanest commitment in the design. The curve after it determines whether your allocation arrives as a series of small non-events or as a handful of dates that show up on every unlock calendar.

Neither shape is correct in the abstract. A long cliff followed by a slow drip is the least disruptive design for holders and the least flexible for a team that needs to fund work. Staged tranches are easier to plan a budget around and harder for holders to ignore. Choose the trade-off deliberately, because you will be living inside it publicly for years.

The three mistakes teams make

Vesting a token allocation and calling the pool secured. These are separate mechanisms on separate contracts. Vesting constrains team supply; it does nothing whatsoever to the liquidity pool.

Picking a cliff that lands on a date nobody thought about. Every release date is public from the moment the contract confirms, and holders will find it — cliffs and tranche dates surface on this week's unlocks as they approach. Pick dates you would be comfortable defending, and communicate before the date rather than after.

Announcing a schedule you have not deployed. A published schedule with no contract behind it is worse than no schedule, because the first buyer who checks finds an unvested wallet and a claim that did not hold.

Vesting or a team token lock?

A team token lock holds an allocation until one date and then releases the whole thing. Vesting releases it gradually across many dates. The lock is simpler and cheaper to reason about; vesting distributes the release so no single moment dominates.

Most teams end up with both mechanisms in play for different purposes, and the pairing is worth being precise about. A lock guarantees exactly one thing: the pool cannot be withdrawn before the release date. Not the price, not the team, not the token. A locked pool can still fall. Vesting vs team locks works through which one fits which allocation, and tokenomics that don't look like a rug covers how the two read together as a supply picture.

What it costs

Team Finance is our sister product, so treat these as dated prices rather than a pitch. As of August 2026, vesting costs $100 per use and a token lock costs $150 per use, with gas paid separately in ETH in both cases. A Pro plan at $2,500 per year covers unlimited use, which only makes sense for teams running many schedules across chains.

Team Finance is a multi-chain Web3 token-management suite that projects and individuals use to lock liquidity, vest tokens, mint and manage supply across chains. You can set up token vesting or lock liquidity through it, and what locking and vesting prove shows how vesting sits alongside the other commitments and what each rung costs.

What buyers see on Locksley afterwards

Once the contract confirms, the schedule renders on your token page without any submission from you: the total amount under vesting, the beneficiary, the cliff date if there is one, and the next release with a countdown. Locksley reads that state from the contracts directly.

Two things follow that teams should plan for. Your upcoming releases appear on the unlock calendar, so holders will see the date coming whether or not you mention it — as of —pending, —pending scheduled releases land on Robinhood Chain in the next seven days, per Locksley's contract reads. And the numbers are read as they are — an allocation described as "long-term committed" that shows a cliff four weeks out will be read as four weeks, not as long-term. Write your announcements to match what the contract says, and the two will never contradict each other.

For the arithmetic behind a schedule — how much is claimable on any given date, and how to check someone else's numbers — team vesting explained in plain English works through the math.

Frequently asked questions