Vesting Schedules for Monad Projects

The shape of the curve decides whether a schedule reads as discipline or as a countdown — and on Monad it is read by counterparties who model unlock curves rather than react to them.

What does each vesting schedule shape do, and how does each one fail?

Four shapes cover almost every schedule in use — cliff-only, linear, cliff-then-linear and milestone-gated — and each fails differently: cliff-only concentrates the whole allocation on one visible date, linear pays a contributor who leaves in month two, cliff-then-linear inherits a smaller version of both, and milestone-gated needs somebody to judge whether the milestone was met. How to set up token vesting on Monad covers what vesting is; this page is about the curve.

Cliff-only holds everything until one timestamp, then releases all of it. Its failure is visibility: the whole allocation becomes available in one block on a date anyone can read from the contract. That is a dated lock rather than a schedule, and a team token lock says so more honestly.

Linear releases continuously from day one with no cliff, and so filters nobody: a contributor who leaves in week six keeps six weeks of tokens, and the schedule has paid for tenure that never happened. It also puts sellable supply into the market on day one, wrong for a thin float.

Cliff-then-linear — a wait, then continuous release across the remaining term — is the sensible default, and its failure is the one teams miss. The accrued balance does not trickle out before the cliff; it lands at the cliff. A twelve-month cliff on a forty-eight-month schedule releases roughly a quarter of the allocation on one date, so the largest single release is almost always the first.

Milestone-gated ties release to conditions rather than dates — mainnet shipped, an audit cleared, a revenue threshold reached. It describes how value is actually earned and is hardest to make credible, because a condition needs an adjudicator, and whoever adjudicates holds discretion over supply. Nor can outsiders model it, since no date goes into a spreadsheet. Give every milestone a backstop date.

How should cliffs and durations differ across founders, team, advisors, treasury and investors?

They differ because each cohort is paid for a different thing over a different horizon, and one schedule applied to all of them is either too long for the advisors or too short for the founders. Common practice as of September 2026 runs founders at thirty-six to forty-eight months behind a twelve-month cliff, employees at twenty-four to thirty-six behind six to twelve, advisors at twelve to twenty-four behind three to six.

The reasoning matters more than the numbers. A founder’s curve is the one every other party benchmarks against, so it should be the slowest on the cap table. Employee schedules are retention instruments: the cliff filters early departures, and the term should match how long a hire’s work takes to show up in the product. Advisor grants are front-loaded in effort and small in size, which argues for a short cliff and a term that ends rather than drifts.

Treasury is not a compensation curve: it is an operating budget with a governance process attached, best structured as dated tranches sized to a spending plan. Investor terms are negotiated rather than designed, and what matters there is irrevocability rather than duration: a schedule the issuer can cancel is not a schedule.

How big can a cliff get before it becomes a market event?

A cliff becomes a market event when the quantity releasing on one date is large relative to the depth available to absorb it, which makes the sizing question one about market depth rather than percentage of supply.

So compare each unlock date against ordinary traded volume and stagger anything that fails the comparison. Monad-wide DEX volume was $136.99M over twenty-four hours as of September 2026, with DefiLlama reporting a weekly change of −36.84%; any one project competes for a slice of that. An unlock forces no sale — it changes the option to sell, and markets price options.

A single enormous unlock date outlives its day, landing in unlock trackers and becoming the question people ask for months beforehand; staggered tranches leave no date worth marking.

Why does a large unlock meet different depth on Monad than on an AMM-only chain?

Because most on-chain trading on Monad clears on a central-limit orderbook rather than an automated market maker — Kuru carried 71.7% of DEX volume, $98.16M over twenty-four hours, as of September 2026 — and orderbook depth is quoted at a participant’s discretion where AMM depth sits passively in a pool. An automated market maker has no opinion about your calendar: it quotes against its reserves whether or not a schedule releases tomorrow, and thins only if liquidity providers withdraw. An orderbook is made of quotes that can be widened, thinned or pulled at any moment, including ahead of an event anyone can see coming.

The limits deserve stating. Volume share is not depth share, and book depth for an individual token is not measurable here. Monad also has real AMM venues alongside Kuru — Uniswap at 10.5% of volume, Balancer at 3.2%, as of September 2026 — so a token’s liquidity may sit on either structure or both. The conclusion is narrow: do not plan an unlock assuming that depth visible the week before is there on the day.

How do Monad’s institutional counterparties read a schedule?

They model it. Monad’s total value locked was $957.23M as of September 2026, concentrated in Aave V3 ($320.94M), K3 Capital ($310.9M), Euler V2 ($241.67M), Pendle ($221.76M) and Morpho Blue ($172.96M) — lending markets, structured credit and a yield venue whose whole business is pricing cash flows across time. Participants there work in forward supply curves, so yours is an input to a model.

For that reader, precision beats reassurance: cohort sizes, cliff dates, cadence and end dates in spreadsheet form beat any adjective. An undisclosed schedule is not neutral — it is a variable they assume the worst about, and the assumption gets priced. MON makes the point itself, circulating roughly 11.83B of 100.68B total supply as of September 2026, about a 12% float against a $2.6B fully diluted valuation. That is market structure rather than criticism, but this market already reads unlock curves closely.

How does a schedule interact with an exchange listing or a fundraise?

Both events are underwritten against your unlock curve, so the schedule needs to exist before the conversation starts rather than being assembled during it. A listing desk asks what quantity reaches the float in the first year and on which dates; an investor asks where their tranche sits relative to yours.

The term most often demanded is precedence: no cohort unlocks ahead of the founders. That is cheap to satisfy by design and expensive to retrofit, since retrofitting means lengthening someone else’s curve, which needs their consent, or extending your own. A large cliff near a listing also stacks two supply changes into one window, and they are read together whether or not they are related. The Monad token launch checklist sequences these against the rest of a launch.

What is the difference between a schedule you publish and one you merely execute?

An executed schedule constrains tokens; a published schedule constrains tokens and removes a question from the market. The on-chain constraint is identical either way — the difference is entirely in who knows, and when.

An unpublished schedule still produces unlocks, and they still appear on-chain. What changes is how they are found: late, by someone watching wallets, and framed as an omission. Publishing means specifics rather than intent — each cohort, the amount, the percentage of supply, the cliff date, cadence, end date, and where the schedule can be checked. How to verify a lock on Monad sets out what a counterparty checks and in what order.

Can you revise a vesting schedule after it is live?

Largely no, and that is the property you are paying for — which is exactly why the initial design carries so much weight. An irrevocable schedule cannot be shortened, accelerated or cancelled by the party it constrains, however reasonable the pressure to do so feels at the time.

What stays available is addition: re-vesting tokens already released, adding a schedule alongside the old one, or committing further supply. Each moves toward more constraint, which is why the market accepts it. The other direction is the honest problem. If a schedule can be shortened then it was revocable all along, and the revocability, not the change, is the disclosure that matters. If it cannot, a team needing different economics renegotiates with recipients rather than editing a contract. Design for the schedule you can defend in three years, not the one comfortable this quarter.

How do you design a vesting schedule on Monad?

Six stages, of which only one is a transaction. Team Finance vests token allocations on Monad at app.team.finance, on the same terms as every other supported chain.

1. Split the cap table by cohort. Separate founders, employees, advisors, treasury and investors, and note what each allocation pays for — that is what sets the term.
2. Choose a shape per cohort, not one for all. Assign cliff-only, linear, cliff-then-linear or milestone-gated by cohort, and accept each shape’s failure mode deliberately rather than later.
3. Size every cliff against market depth, not supply. Compare the quantity releasing on each date with ordinary traded volume, and split anything that dominates that comparison into dated tranches.
4. Stagger dates so no single day is an event. Offset cliffs and cadences between cohorts, keeping every other cohort behind the founders so precedence is never argued.
5. Execute the schedules and pay the fee. The allocation moves into the vesting contract, the release curve is written on-chain, and the fee is charged in MON — after which the schedule constrains its own authors.
6. Publish the curve, not the headline. Record each cohort, amount, percentage of supply, cliff date, cadence, end date and the contract holding it, so a counterparty can rebuild the curve unaided.

One cohort settles itself here: a nad.fun graduate’s pool liquidity was locked by the protocol at graduation and never passed through the team’s hands; what remains is the founder position, treasury and advisor grants. After nad.fun graduation covers that inventory.

FAQ

Does publishing the schedule matter if the contract is public anyway? An executed schedule constrains tokens; a published schedule constrains tokens and removes a question from the market.

What does vesting cost on Monad? Vesting on Monad costs $100 per schedule as of September 2026, fixed in USD and charged in MON. Pricing is published at <a href="https://www.team.finance" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">team.finance</a>.

Next steps: set up vesting · lock the founder allocation · verify a lock · back to the Monad hub