Vesting releases an allocation gradually instead of all at once. It is the mechanism that turns “the team is aligned long term” from a sentence in a deck into a property of the ledger, and on Arc it costs fractions of a cent to set up.
Works on Arc testnet today; mainnet September 16, 2026.
The three shapes
Cliff. Nothing releases until a date, then a block releases at once. A twelve-month cliff on a founder allocation means zero tokens are claimable for a year. Cliffs exist to filter out people who will not be around.
Linear. Tokens release continuously — per second, in practice — across a period. Smooth, predictable, easy for the market to price.
Cliff plus linear. The standard, borrowed from equity: a cliff, then linear release over a longer period. A common contributor schedule is a twelve-month cliff followed by linear release over the following twenty-four to thirty-six months.
Custom. Stepped tranches, back-weighted curves, milestone-linked releases. Useful for investor rounds with negotiated terms, and worth keeping simple enough that a buyer can understand it from one sentence.
Who gets vested, and roughly how
| Group | Typical shape | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Founders and core team | 12-month cliff, then 24–36 months linear | Longest commitment, most scrutinised allocation |
| Employees | 6–12 month cliff, then 24–48 months linear | Mirrors equity practice |
| Advisors | 3–6 month cliff, then 12–24 months linear | Shorter engagement, smaller allocation |
| Private investors | Negotiated, often 6–12 month cliff, then 12–24 months | Balances round terms against sell pressure |
| Public sale | Often immediate, sometimes partial | Buyers who paid at launch usually expect liquidity |
Treat these as reference points rather than rules. What matters more than the exact numbers is that the schedule is enforced on chain and stated publicly in the same terms.
How to create a vesting schedule on Arc
Team Finance's vesting tool is non-custodial and covers 26 chains, with more than $2.7 billion secured across 40,000+ projects since 2020.
- Connect your wallet to Arc and fund it with USDC. Gas is USDC on Arc and testnet transactions average about $0.004. Network setup.
- Open the vesting tool and select Arc.
- Enter the token contract address.
- Add recipients. Each entry is an address, an amount, and a schedule. Batch entry matters here — a fifteen-person team is fifteen schedules, and doing them one at a time invites typos.
- Set the cliff and the release period for each recipient or group.
- Review the totals against your published tokenomics. The sum of all vesting schedules should reconcile with the allocation table you have promised.
- Approve and create. Then publish the explorer links.
[SCREENSHOT: Team Finance vesting form with recipients, cliff and linear release period on Arc]
Mistakes that cost projects credibility
Units. Entering a cliff in days when the field expects months, or an amount without accounting for 18 decimals, produces a schedule that is wrong in a way you cannot undo. Verify the first schedule on the explorer before creating the rest.
Wrong addresses. A vesting schedule to a mistyped address is a permanent burn. Copy addresses from a signed message or a wallet, never from a chat.
Vesting nothing that matters. A schedule covering 2% of supply while the founders hold 30% unvested is worse than no schedule, because it looks like an attempt to seem compliant.
Silence at the cliff. The market knows when your cliff lands. Say in advance what will happen — whether recipients intend to hold, whether the team is extending — rather than letting the date arrive unannounced.
Vesting alongside the rest of the launch
Vesting is one of four things a careful buyer checks. The others are the token contract (verified, mint renounced or explained), the liquidity lock, and the distribution. Do all four and publish them together as explorer links.
Mint the token → lock the liquidity → vest → distribute. Team token locks covers the reserves and treasury side.
Rehearse on testnet
Public mainnet opens September 16, 2026 and mainnet parameters have not been published by Circle. Build a full set of schedules on the public testnet first — chain ID 5042002, faucet at faucet.circle.com — and read them back on the explorer. Schedules are the launch artefact most likely to contain a silent data-entry error. Testnet guide.
Sources: docs.arc.network · Circle pressroom · Arcscan.
Last verified: August 2026