For most funded projects, the right token vesting schedule is four years for the team with a one-year cliff, a cliffed schedule for investors that never shares the team’s unlock month, and all of it enforced on-chain. The team terms are the market norm. In Pulley’s data on nearly 100 companies that issued tokens on its platform in 2023, nearly 85% used four-year vesting with a one-year cliff for grants.
Who decides this
The CFO and the foundation council own vesting. The council approves who gets tokens and on what terms, because those terms are promises to holders. The CFO owns the signed agreements, the deployed contracts and the reconciliation between them. The engineer who deploys the contracts executes the schedule; the engineer should never be the one who decides it.
The stakes are large because the insider share is large. Pulley’s data found that, on average, nearly half of tokens were reserved for contributors and investors. Investor and team allocations alone generally fell between 15% and 30% of supply. A schedule covering that much of the supply is a market event, not an HR policy.
How long should the team vest, and with what cliff?
The team should vest over four years with a one-year cliff, measured from TGE for tokens that existed before launch. Shorter schedules exist, but a funded team needs a reason to depart from the norm, and holders will ask for it.
The norm is visible in large launches. Uniswap’s 2020 launch post put team, investor and adviser tokens on four-year vesting, with 40% in year one, then 30%, 20% and 10%. Arbitrum’s published distribution put all investor and team tokens under four-year lockups, with the first unlock a year after TGE and monthly unlocks for the three years after.
Streamflow’s 2026 benchmark report treats a 12-month cliff as the credibility floor for founders and core teams, with three to four years of linear vesting. We agree, for one more reason. In Keyrock’s study of more than 16,000 unlocks, as reported by BeInCrypto, team unlocks were the most harmful category, with average price drops of up to 25%. The team schedule is the one the market watches most closely.
Two details matter more than the headline length. First, decide whether the clock starts at TGE or at the grant date, and write it down; new hires after TGE usually need their own start date. Second, decide what happens to unvested tokens when someone leaves. A schedule with no forfeiture rule is a gift, not a vesting schedule.
Should investors vest on the same schedule as the team?
Investors should be cliffed and linear, but their unlock dates should not coincide with the team’s. Whether their schedule is shorter is a negotiation; whether it collides with the team’s is a design error.
The market splits on length. Uniswap and Arbitrum put investors on the same four-year terms as the team. Streamflow’s benchmark describes investor schedules as shorter, with cliffs of six to twelve months and two to three years of total vesting. Neither is wrong. A longer investor schedule signals alignment; a shorter one may have been the price of the round.
Investor unlocks also behave differently. In BeInCrypto’s summary, Keyrock found investors often use OTC deals, derivatives and options to limit selling on the open market, so their unlocks showed more controlled price behaviour than team unlocks. That argues for writing a structured-sale route into investor agreements, not for shortening the schedule.
The collision risk is the one to design out. Tokenomist warns that staggered cliffs for different holder groups within one quarter can create cascading supply shocks. Separate team and investor cliffs by at least a quarter, and test the combined calendar against expected trading volume.
What should advisers receive, and on what terms?
Advisers should vest over a shorter period than the team, with a cliff that matches the first review of their contribution and a clear rule for stopping vesting when the engagement ends. Adviser allocations are small, but they are the bucket most often granted loosely.
Practice varies. Uniswap’s advisers held 0.69% of supply on the same four-year schedule as everyone else. Tokenomist cites Polygon’s advisers as having a one-year cliff followed by three years of linear vesting. Streamflow’s benchmark puts adviser vesting at 12 to 24 months, often graded. Our own view is that a long cliff is the protection that matters: an adviser who stops contributing in month four should not hold tokens.
| Group | Common cliff | Common total vesting | Published examples | What we would check |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Team and founders | 12 months | 3–4 years | Uniswap 4 years; Arbitrum 4 years, first unlock after one year | Start date per person; forfeiture on departure |
| Investors | 6–12 months | 2–4 years | Uniswap and Arbitrum on team terms; Streamflow reports 2–3 years as common | Cliff month differs from team; OTC route agreed |
| Advisers | Up to 12 months | 1–4 years | Uniswap 4 years; Polygon one-year cliff then three years linear | Vesting stops when the engagement ends |
How much should unlock at TGE?
Keep the TGE unlock for team, investors and advisers at zero, and keep total TGE float modest. Anything vested at TGE is supply on the most volatile day the token will have.
Streamflow’s report cites a Tokenomics.com analysis of more than 200 launches. Tokens with a TGE unlock above 25% saw a median first-year price decline of 72%. Those under 15% saw a median decline of 38%. That is a correlation across launches, not proof that the unlock caused the decline, and both groups fell. But it is consistent with everything else in the data: new supply against thin early liquidity hurts.
Which terms besides length belong in the agreement?
Length and cliff get the attention, but the clauses around them decide whether the schedule holds. We would not sign off a vesting agreement that leaves any of the following open.
What happens to unvested tokens on departure, for good and bad leavers. Whether vesting can be accelerated, by whom, and whether the council must approve. Whether vested but unclaimed tokens count in circulating supply. Which wallet receives tokens, and whether it belongs to the entity that signed or to an individual. How the schedule interacts with any staking or lending of locked tokens.
We know of no published market standard for any of them. That is exactly why the council should decide them explicitly rather than inherit whatever a template or a contract default says.
Where should the schedule live: contract, custodian or spreadsheet?
The schedule should live in an audited vesting contract whose parameters anyone can check, with the signed agreements as the legal record. A schedule in a spreadsheet is only a promise.
On-chain enforcement changes the conversation with holders. Tokenomist notes that cliff dates are typically fixed in smart contracts or binding agreements, and changing them generally needs a contract upgrade or a governance vote. That rigidity is the point. Holders can see the schedule, and the team cannot quietly change it.
Release cadence is a design choice too. Tokenomist defines linear vesting as daily release and counts any release less frequent than daily, including monthly, as a cliff. Daily release spreads selling across more sessions; monthly release is simpler to administer and report. Vesting infrastructure such as Team Finance holds these schedules on-chain, so holders can verify them. Our token vesting hub covers the mechanics.
What goes wrong: tokenomics the contractor rewrote
The council approved four years with a one-year cliff. The contractor deployed something else, and nobody compared the two.
The changes are mundane. A duration entered in days where the agreement said months. A start timestamp set to deployment rather than TGE. A beneficiary address that belongs to an individual rather than the entity named in the agreement. A contract deployed as revocable when the agreement said it was not, or the reverse. An adviser bucket sent as a plain transfer because the vesting contract was “not ready yet”.
Each change looks small. Together they mean the published schedule is not the enforced one, and the first person to notice is an on-chain analyst. The defence is a reconciliation before TGE: every signed agreement, every contract parameter and every wallet, matched line by line, with authority to stop the launch on a mismatch.
How Alcyone approaches it
Alcyone treats vesting as part of the token model, not a separate payroll task. Vesting structures sit within Alcyone’s fundraising and tokenomics advisory, alongside fundraising strategy, so investor terms and the vesting schedule are set by the same people. The partners behind Alcyone built and operate Team Finance, with 40,000+ projects on Team Finance, though clients are under no obligation to use TrustSwap products.