Token Unlock Risk Monitor

THE CONCEPT. Many tokens launch with a small fraction of supply circulating, the rest locked for teams, investors and treasuries and released over years. Price is formed against the CIRCULATING supply while the eventual supply may be several times larger, so a holder faces future dilution that today's market capitalisation does not show.

FULLY DILUTED VALUATION is the standard expression: price times TOTAL supply, against market capitalisation, which is price times circulating. A large gap between them is the quantity this analysis is about. Treat FDV carefully. It applies today's MARGINAL token price to all the supply the provider counts - typically total minted supply, and under some methodologies maximum eventual supply - whether that supply is circulating, locked, or not yet issued at all. That is a strong assumption, and where the remainder is released over many years raw FDV becomes far less informative unless the schedule, expected burns and time value are considered.

WHY DILUTION IS NOT AUTOMATICALLY A PRICE FALL, which is the nuance most commentary misses. An unlock increases TRANSFERABLE or circulating supply - not usually total supply - and it can also change expectations, incentives and desired holdings. Downward pressure depends on anticipated and realised selling against available liquidity, and can appear BEFORE the date as the market prices what it expects. Three things follow: an unlock to a long-term holder who does not sell has little direct effect; a schedule published years ahead is known and, under semi-strong efficiency, should be substantially anticipated; and the evidence is limited and methodologically uneven - large industry studies generally report negative average pressure, with effects varying widely by size, recipient and conditions, so no unlock is automatically a decline.

THE VOLUME CUSHION is the right refinement, and the reasoning is the market-impact reasoning from the execution analyses: what matters is unlocked value relative to the market's ability to ABSORB it. A large unlock into a deep market is different from a small one into a thin market, and unlock value over daily volume is a rough way to compare them - rough because volume is TURNOVER rather than depth, and crypto volume can be inflated by wash trading. Order-book depth, spreads and venue concentration would measure absorption capacity properly.

WHAT THIS ANALYSIS ACTUALLY HAS: a current SUPPLY SNAPSHOT rather than a published unlock calendar. So it can tell you HOW MUCH is not yet circulating and cannot tell you WHEN it arrives or to WHOM. Those are the two facts that decide the impact. A token with 40% locked releasing evenly over five years and one releasing it all next month have identical snapshots and completely different risk.

THE ANNUALISED INFLATION ESTIMATE inherits the same limit, and more sharply than it appears: a supply SNAPSHOT measures the remaining non-circulating share, and no annual rate can be derived from it without an explicit release horizon. Calling the result a magnitude rather than a rate does not repair that - the time dimension is simply absent from the input.