The minimum holding period before any tokens unlock. A 12-month cliff means the holder gets nothing for 12 months, then a chunk unlocks at month 12, then more vests linearly.

What's a "linear vest"?

Tokens unlock continuously (usually daily) over a defined period. A 24-month linear vest with no cliff means 1/24th of the allocation becomes available each month.

Is longer vesting always better for retail?

Longer vesting on insiders is generally better for retail (less sell pressure). Longer vesting on retail is worse (less liquidity). Read each cohort's schedule separately.

Vesting and cliffs explained — for presale buyers

A 12-month cliff on insiders sounds like a positive. It's often the opposite. How vesting actually shapes the price chart, with a worked example.

Vesting is the schedule on which tokens become tradeable. Cliffs are the lock-up periods before vesting starts. Together they determine how much sell pressure hits the market and when — and they are the single most important number in a presale that retail consistently doesn’t read carefully.

How vesting math actually works

A typical project has 5-7 cohorts, each with its own schedule:

Seed investors (often 12-month cliff, 24-36 month linear)
Private round (6-month cliff, 18-24 month linear)
Public presale tier 1, 2, 3 (varies — sometimes 0/0, sometimes 3-month cliff)
Team & advisors (12-24 month cliff, 36-48 month linear)
Treasury / DAO (often 0 cliff, slow drip)
Liquidity / market making (typically 0/0)
Airdrop / community (varies)

Each cohort’s tokens become sellable on its own schedule. The aggregate “supply available to sell” curve is the sum of all cohorts.

Worked example — why a 12-month cliff isn’t your friend

Take a $500M FDV project with 1B total tokens.

Seed: 10% (100M tokens) at $0.05 — 12-month cliff, then 24 months linear.
Private: 15% (150M) at $0.20 — 6-month cliff, 18-month linear.
Public presale: 8% (80M) at $0.50 — 0/0 vesting.
Team: 18% (180M) at $0 — 24-month cliff, 36-month linear.

Month 0 (TGE). 80M tokens are sellable (the public presale). At a $0.50 listing price, that’s $40M of potential sell pressure. Liquidity at TGE is usually $1-3M. So the public-presale cohort itself has 13-40x the liquidity to sell into. The price drops fast in week 1.

Month 6. Private round cliff hits. 150M private tokens start vesting linearly over 18 months — that’s 8.3M new sellable tokens per month, on top of whatever the public cohort still holds. Each $0.20 buyer is up 1.5x on their entry if the price is at $0.30. They’ll sell.

Month 12. Seed round cliff hits. 100M seed tokens at $0.05 entry start vesting over 24 months — 4.2M new sellable tokens per month. Each seed investor is up 2-6x even at a depressed price.

Month 24. Team cliff hits. The biggest cohort by volume starts unlocking.

Result. Three concentrated dump events at month 0, month 6, and month 12, plus continuous bleed from month 6 onwards. The chart looks like a series of waterfalls.

Why retail keeps holding into this

A buyer at $0.50 watches the chart drop to $0.30, then $0.18, then $0.12. They convince themselves “the team is building, it’ll come back”. The team is building — but the chart is fighting a 24-month supply unlock that arithmetically cannot be absorbed by retail demand at the rate it’s hitting.

Most retail capitulates around month 9-15, exactly when the chart looks worst, just before insider unlocks slow.

What a fair vesting structure looks like

Vesting alone doesn’t make a project a good buy, but these patterns are at least defensible:

Insiders vest longer than retail. This is the minimum. If retail’s 0/0 and seed has a 6-month cliff, you’re being asked to take the worst risk position.
No single month has more than ~5% of supply unlocking. Plot the cumulative sellable supply curve and look for cliffs.
Total dilution from unlocks in year 1 is under 50% of total supply. Less means slower bleed.
Team has a meaningful cliff (12+ months) and meaningful vest (24+ months). Otherwise the team can fund-raise, stop building at month 6, and dump.

How to plot the unlock curve

You can do this in 30 minutes in a spreadsheet:

List each cohort with its allocation %, cliff, and vest length.
For each month from 0 to 48, calculate sellable supply for each cohort.
Sum across cohorts.
Plot.

Most tokenomics pages publish the data; a few projects (Token Unlocks, CryptoRank) maintain dashboards for live projects. If a project’s tokenomics doesn’t give you enough data to do this yourself, that’s a red flag.

What to do if you’ve already bought

You can’t change the vesting schedule. You can:

Plan your exits around the unlock curve, not against it. Selling into the rise before a cliff is usually better than holding into it.
Set price alerts at the levels you’ve decided to take liquidity at, written down before TGE.
Decide in advance what you’ll do if the team starts to look absent — months 4-6 are when team behaviour starts to diverge between builders and exit-players.

The honest summary

Vesting schedules are public information. Most projects publish them. They tell you, with arithmetic certainty, what the supply side of the chart is going to look like for 24-48 months. Retail consistently ignores them and consistently loses money to them.

Plot the curve. Decide if you want to be in this market at this point on this curve. Then act on what the math tells you.

Research, not advice. This article is editorial. We are not your financial adviser. Crypto presales can lose 100% of capital.