A quick disambiguation, because search engines conflate these: this page is about issuing vesting for your project's contributors and investors on Arbitrum. If you're looking for when ARB itself unlocks, you want an unlock tracker, not this. Still here? Good — here's how to run cap-table-grade vesting on-chain.
What is on-chain vesting, and why run it on Arbitrum?
On-chain vesting is a smart contract that releases tokens to each recipient on a fixed schedule — cliffs, linear release, or custom cadences — so entitlements are enforced by code and readable by anyone rather than tracked in a spreadsheet and trusted. On Arbitrum the case is unusually strong: gas is fractions of a cent, so a hundred-recipient schedule with monthly releases costs essentially nothing to operate, and this is a chain where your counterparties — investors, exchanges, DAO delegates reviewing a grant — actually read the contracts. A published vesting contract answers the "how do we know the team won't dump" question permanently, in a form nobody has to take your word for.
How do you set up vesting on Arbitrum?
One deployment covers the whole cap table:
- Open Team Finance, choose vesting, select Arbitrum, and connect your wallet at team.finance.
- Add recipients. Manually for a handful, or upload the whole list via CSV, Excel, or Google Sheets. Confirm every recipient controls their address before you deploy — misdirected vesting is the most common and least fixable operational mistake.
- Configure schedules. Cliff, release cadence (per block, daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly), and end date — set per recipient, so founders, contributors, advisors, and investors can all carry different terms in one deployment. What terms to actually use is the next question.
- Choose contract types deliberately. Employee and advisor contracts can be terminated later, returning unvested tokens to the project; investor contracts cannot be ended by anyone. This is irreversible once deployed — see below.
- Pay $100 flat in ETH and deploy. No percentage of the vested tokens (pricing) — which matters at treasury scale, as the comparison page shows with the arithmetic.
- Point recipients at the Claim dashboard and put the contract address in your docs. Each claim is an ordinary Arbiscan-visible transaction.
Employee versus investor contracts — the choice you can't undo
Employee and advisor contracts are terminable, returning unvested tokens to the project when someone leaves; investor contracts are irrevocable by anyone, including you. Both directions are protections, pointed in opposite directions — and both mistakes are visible on-chain. Putting investors on terminable contracts reads as an escape hatch, and any competent investor's counsel will spot it during diligence. Putting employees on irrevocable ones means a contributor who leaves in month four keeps earning for three more years. Decide per relationship rather than per deployment, and write the rationale into the docs alongside the contract address — on Arbitrum, someone will compare what you wrote to what you deployed.
Vesting, locks, or both?
Vest people who earn over time; lock allocations that simply shouldn't move — most Arbitrum projects need both, and they answer different diligence questions. Vesting is a payroll system: continuous release, per-recipient terms, termination rights where appropriate. A team token lock is a single commitment with one date and maximum legibility — the thing you point at when someone asks "what stops the founders selling?" The common structure for a funded DeFi team: hard-lock the founding allocation, vest contributors and advisors, and put the investor tranches on irrevocable schedules matching the term sheet. If your tokens came from a grant rather than a raise, the grant token-ops checklist covers the reporting angle too.
FAQ
How much does vesting cost on Arbitrum? $100 flat per deployment in ETH, regardless of recipient count or token value, with no percentage taken. Gas is fractions of a cent.
Can I change a schedule after deploying? Schedules execute as deployed. Employee and advisor contracts can be terminated (unvested tokens return to the project); investor contracts can't be modified or ended. Plan before deploying.
Can recipients see their own schedule? Yes — each recipient's schedule and claimable balance appear in the Claim dashboard, and the contract is public on Arbiscan.
What if a recipient loses wallet access? Vested tokens claimable by a lost wallet are a genuine operational risk. Collect and confirm addresses carefully before deployment, and prefer smart accounts or multisigs for larger allocations.
Is this the same as an ARB unlock schedule? No — unrelated. ARB's own unlock schedule is a property of the Arbitrum token; this is vesting you deploy for your project's token.
Next steps: what schedule to use · lock team tokens instead · back to the Arbitrum hub
Arbitrum is developed by Offchain Labs and governed by the Arbitrum DAO; ARB is the governance token of the Arbitrum ecosystem. TrustSwap is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Offchain Labs, the Arbitrum Foundation, or the Arbitrum DAO. All product and company names are trademarks of their respective holders; their use here is for identification purposes only.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. Facts current as of August 2026.