Multiple crypto projects will unlock their tokens as their vesting periods end, freeing assets allocated to team members and early investors.
With vesting periods nearing an end for numerous projects, around $2.68 billion worth of tokens will be unlocked this month.
According to Tokenomist, $1.7 billion will be unlocked linearly, and more than $900 million will be unlocked through a cliff basis. Out of all the tokens witnessing ending vesting periods, Memecoin (MEME), Aptos (APT), Arbitrum (ARB), Avalanche (AVA), and Optimism (OP) are the most looked forward to.
Token vesting is a practice most projects follow to prevent early investors and project team members from dumping allocated assets as soon as they receive them from projects. Instead, the tokens allocated to these participants are released in a phased manner. In other words, while the projects owe the tokens to them, the assets remain locked, preventing early selling activity from hindering the growth of said projects. Without established user bases, token dumping by participants at early stages could drive project valuations to the ground.
Notable Projects Unlocking Tokens This Month
With that, it is time for growing projects to unlock tokens for their early stakeholders. Memecoin, an on-chain meme project, unlocked 3.45 billion MEME tokens on November 3. Those tokens, distributed via its airdrop, are collectively worth about $37 million. Beyond that, the project will unlock 10.7 million tokens linearly every day. That amounts to $117,000 linear emissions daily. MEME is trading at $0.010 per token, an 81% drop from its high of 0.053 this year.
Aptos, a well-known layer-1 blockchain, will unlock 11.31 million tokens this month, worth about $93 million. Out of that, $32 million will go to its core contributors, $26 million to its community, $11 million to the Aptos Foundation, and $23 million to investors.
Its competitor, the layer-1 Avalanche blockchain, will also unlock tokens for its foundation—1.67 million AVAX, to be precise. Optimism will do the same for its investors and core contributors, freeing 31.4 million OP tokens worth about $44 million.
Those are not the only blockchains. Ethereum layer-2 Arbitrum will also emit 92.65 million ARB tokens worth $45 million, which will go to its team, advisers, and investors. The network also released tokens previously in March, an event that saw the unlocking of 1.1 billion ARB, amounting to $2.32 billion. A couple of months before the event, ARB was worth $2.39 a pop, its all-time high (ATH) recorded in January. Today, it trades for less than $0.50.
