Crypto’s Token Lockup Orthodoxy Is a Scam

Today’s prevailing token distribution model is fundamentally broken, says Christopher Goes, co-creator of Anoma and Namada.

Today’s crypto market is dominated by a particular token distribution model, known as the “low-float, high FDV” launch. This approach involves launching a project with a small fraction of its total supply in circulation, with the majority of the tokens locked up, typically set to unlock gradually over a period of one year. This low circulation is often designed to encourage a high fully-diluted valuation (FDV). According to research by CoinGecko, nearly a quarter of the industry's top tokens now have a low float. Some recent notable launches that have utilized this model include Starknet, Aptos, Arbitrum, Optimism, Celestia, and Worldcoin (where an astonishing 95.7% of supply remains locked at the time of this writing).

However, this model is fundamentally flawed. Restricting the movement of tokens distorts the market signal and misleads both actual and potential network participants who rely on that signal to make decisions. This “low-float, high FDV” approach results in a scenario where most of the upside potential of new launches is captured by private investors, leaving little to be available in the public markets. Ultimately, this pattern of launching tokens inflates short-term metrics at the cost of long-term sustainability and the public trust.

The fallacy of crypto vesting

The term “vesting” in crypto bears little resemblance to the actual functionality of vesting mechanisms in the traditional finance world, where vesting is used to align incentives and ensure stakeholder obligations. For instance, in traditional corporations (e.g., RSUs), vesting comes with specific performance expectations and the possibility of revoking further ownership stake if those expectations are not met. In contrast, vesting lockups in crypto networks have no such mechanism – instead, tokens are simply locked up for a set period of time before being unlocked.

These types of lockups, which don’t deserve the name “vesting” at all, typically distort the market signal by giving the false impression of much higher demand than there actually is. If we understand price signals as the clearing point between the supply and demand for an asset, the value of those signals to the market depends on the freedom of both the supply and demand sides to express their preferences (e.g., sell if they want to sell, and buy if they want to buy). Lockups prevent one side of the market from expressing their preferences, thus degrading the overall signal quality. While this may provide some temporary benefit in market cap ranking or other metrics, it ultimately worsens the market quality because the price signals carry less information.

Even worse, in practice, these lockups simply screw the public. Token holders who join a project after launch are disadvantaged by the gradual unlocks, which present them with an inaccurate price signal that does not reflect actual market sentiment. Sophisticated holders of locked tokens with access to non-public markets and information have an unfair advantage and often sell locked tokens off-market anyway. To get a sense of the true market signal, you have to analyze exactly who might want to sell but is unable to and speculate on what deals are taking place in back rooms. This analysis is too complex and time-intensive for most public market participants to undertake.

The inevitability of market pressure

Lockups don’t prevent people from selling; they merely delay the inevitable. Vesting terms eventually expire, and those who want to sell eventually do so, putting continual downward pressure on the market, often leading to an artificial “slow bleed” in market capitalization. Personally, I would be hesitant to hold an asset or participate in a network where many holders might want to exit but are unable to. It’s also a problem for participants like validators, who require accurate price signals to sustainably predict income and operational costs.

If one goal of the crypto space is to produce meaningful products that provide real, long-term value, practices designed to artificially inflate short-term metrics will not help get us there. To accurately evaluate the potential of any particular project, you need the ability to evaluate whether people are actually committed to that project. You can’t do that if you don’t know whether people hold tokens because they truly believe in the project or because they’re prohibited from selling.

This criticism of the low-float, FDV orthodoxy has been accompanied by calls for new, “fair launch” approaches to token distribution. However, many of these proposals merely advocate for a higher percentage of circulating supply at launch and do not call into question the legitimacy of “vesting” lockups per se.

This doesn’t go far enough. Any form of artificial manipulation of market signals is still artificial manipulation of market signals. We need to break crypto’s vesting Overton window with a variety of new experiments.

The free-market launch

This approach, which we’ve been calling the “free-market launch,” has the great advantage that it allows everyone to freely express their preferences. If you want to sell, you can sell. If you want to buy, you can buy. Best of all