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More than $3 billion in tokens unlocked in May: Here’s what to watch
As the happy month of May begins to peek through the clouds, second Unlocks via token data.
The two largest unlocks will come from Oracle DeFi network Pyth and crypto derivatives platform Aevo (formerly Ribbon Finance).
Most crypto projects make their total supply of tokens available over days, weeks, months, or years. Bitcoin, for example, currently has 19.7 million of its 21 million total supply in circulation. Most projects specify the timeline of their tokenomics in documentation as a White paper.
Two billion dollar breakouts
THE most notable unlock is the much-hyped Oracle DeFi network Pitowhich will see its first release only six months later launch. Unlock May 20 at 2pm UTC, 2.13 billion PITH tokens will flow into the market. Using current prices, the unlock will take place with approximately $1.24 billion.
Just over half of these tokens will go towards ecosystem growth, a quarter will go towards publisher rewards, and the remaining tokens will help the development of the protocol and will be auctioned via private sales.
This unlock is a cliff unlock, like defined by TokenUnlocks, meaning that most tokens will be unlocked in one moment rather than being drip-fed over multiple days. Pyth will unlock 2.13 billion tokens in May 2024 with the next unlock, of the same amount of tokens, starting one year later.
While Aevo, for example, will implement both cliff and linear unlocking. Linear unlocks are released daily for a specified amount.
On May 15th 827.6 million AEVO tokens ($1.24 billion) will be released to the market. So, 6.13 million AEVO tokens ($9.20 million) will be released into the market every day for the next nine days.
In this case, most of the tokens will go to the Treasury DAO followed by the team and the “private sale initial investors”. After that, there will be no more scheduled token unlocks.
Between these two projects, just over $2.5 billion will already enter the cryptocurrency market.
Size matters
While the rest of the projects won’t see billions unlocked, these are still noteworthy events with millions of people entering the market.
Ethereum competitor Avalanchefor example, it will release 9.54 million AVAX tokens ($329.19 million) on May 22. These tokens will go to the team, foundation, strategic partners and 1.13 million tokens AVAX ($38.81 million) being air-launched.
Memecoin will also release 5.31 billion MEMES tokens ($147.95 million) on May 3, followed by 49.47 MEME tokens ($1.38 million) per day for the next 184 days. Most of the cliff unlocking will be released as an airdrop, while the linear unlocking will mainly flow into the ecosystem and investors.
Memecoin is exactly what it says on the tin, a speculative asset with no utility, roadmap or promise – it’s literally just a meme. Created by the community company Memelandhis 2 million strong fans he can stake or farm his token Stakeland OR Meme farming respectively.
Ethereum L2 Referee will unlock 92.65 million ARB ($103.76 million) on May 16, all going to the team, future team, advisors and investors. Meanwhile Aptos is unlocking 11.31 APP ($102.1 million) on May 12 for the foundation, community, key contributors and investors.
Finally, the Bored Monkey theme ApeCoin will release 15.6 million MONKEY ($19.97 million) on May 17, earmarked primarily for Treasury and Yuga Labs according to TokenUnlocks.
By Stacy Elliott.