Fifty-four scheduled token unlocks will each release more than 2% of a token’s circulating supply between October and December 2026. Together they are worth about $0.88 billion at today’s prices, and one of them is more than half of that: Monad on November 24, $484 million, a third of MON’s circulating supply.
We mapped the quarter against the base rates from our study of 5,664 past unlocks. The short version: for unlocks this large, history says to watch the month before the date, not the month after.
Key findings
- 54 scheduled cliff token unlocks of more than 2% of circulating supply fall between 1 October and 31 December 2026, worth about $0.88 billion at prices of 29 September 2026 (DefiLlama emissions data).
- Monad’s unlock on 24 November 2026, $484 million and a third of MON’s circulating supply, is 55.1% of all Q4 2026 unlock value in our list of 54; the other 53 events add up to $395 million.
- Nine Q4 2026 token unlocks exceed 10% of circulating supply, and November carries $560 million of unlock value against $200 million in October and $118 million in December.
- Base rate for large unlocks: in 309 past unlocks above 10% of supply (2018 to 2026), tokens fell a median 13.7% against bitcoin in the 30 days before the date and 6.6% in the 30 days after, against 7.5% in an ordinary month.
- Caveat: dollar values move with prices and teams can change schedules; a base rate is a median across past events, not a forecast for any single token.
One unlock dominates the quarter
Monad’s November 24 cliff accounts for 55.1% of all Q4 unlock value in our list. Take it out and the other 53 events add up to $395 million. The next largest is DoubleZero on October 2, $106 million and 45% of circulating supply in a single day.
Dollar size and relative size tell different stories. aPriori (October 23), Grvt (November 29) and HumidiFi (December 3) are small in dollars, $13 million to $18 million each, but each one adds more than 40% to its circulating supply in a single day: 47%, 41% and 46%. Nine unlocks this quarter exceed 10% of circulating supply.
By month, November carries $560 million, against $200 million in October and $118 million in December.
What history says about unlocks this size
In our study of past cliff unlocks, the 309 events above 10% of circulating supply behaved differently from smaller ones. Measured against bitcoin, those tokens lost a median 13.7% in the 30 days before the unlock and 6.6% in the 30 days after. In an ordinary month with no unlock nearby, the same kind of token loses 7.5%.
The pattern makes sense once you remember that unlock schedules are public years in advance. For large, well-known cliffs, the selling tends to happen in anticipation. By the date itself, the month that follows looks no worse than normal.
Applied to this quarter, the window worth watching for Monad is roughly October 25 to November 24, and for DoubleZero it has already largely passed. For the smaller unlocks of 1% to 3%, which make up 25 of the 54, history shows no such front-running: those tokens lag bitcoin by a similar 10% to 11% both before and after.
What this is not
A base rate is a median across hundreds of past events, not a forecast for any single token. The spread around those medians is wide, and a specific token can move on its own news regardless of its unlock. Treat the figures above as the starting assumption a careful reader should have to argue away, not as a prediction.
Download the data (CSV)
q4-2026-token-unlocks.csv: one row per unlock (54), 1 October to 31 December 2026, tranches on the same day merged by project. Columns: project, coin id, date, tokens released, % of circulating supply, value in USD millions at 29 September 2026 prices, size band, merged tranches, recipient categories, and the historical median return relative to bitcoin 30 days before and after for that size band. Free to use and cite under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to BullpenBrief and a link to this page.
Methodology
Unlock schedules come from DefiLlama’s emissions dataset, retrieved 29 September 2026. We kept cliff events, meaning discrete releases on a single date, between 1 October and 31 December 2026 that release at least 2% of the tokens already circulating at that moment. Several projects split one day’s release into separate tranches for insiders, investors and treasuries; the market sees those as one event, so we merged tranches by project and date.
We excluded tokenized stocks. DefiLlama lists tokenized equities such as SpaceX and Cerebras with schedules that are really post-IPO share lockups; priced at share prices they produced a single “unlock” worth $190 billion, which would have swamped every crypto figure here.
Dollar values use current prices from the DefiLlama coins API and will change with the market. Schedules themselves can also change if a team delays or restructures a release. Base rates are from our earlier study of 5,664 cliff unlocks since 2018, measured as return relative to bitcoin, with random windows on the same tokens as the control. Figures, charts and methodology are free to cite with attribution to BullpenBrief.
