Token Unlocks: How to Read a Supply Schedule

The last week of September 2026 carries a heavy cluster of scheduled token releases. Public unlock calendars have one project releasing 1.76 billion XPL on 25 September, with two others putting a further $26 million or so into circulation around the same window.

Unlock weeks come round constantly, and the reporting around them is usually a price prediction. The more useful thing is to understand what the event actually is.

Total supply is not circulating supply

A token has a total supply, fixed by the contract. It has a circulating supply, which is total supply minus everything that cannot currently move: team allocations under vesting, investor tranches under a cliff, treasury held by a multisig, ecosystem funds behind a timelock.

An unlock does not create tokens. Nothing is minted. What changes is that a portion of what already existed becomes transferable. Total supply is flat across the event; circulating supply steps up.

That distinction matters because "fully diluted valuation" prices the first number and the market trades the second. A project whose circulating supply is 8% of total has 92% of its supply arriving on a schedule somebody wrote down.

How schedules are usually built

• A cliff. Nothing for a fixed period, then a lump. This is the shape that produces a calendar event.
• Linear vesting. A continuous drip, often per block or per month, after any cliff has passed.
• Milestone releases. Tied to something happening, which means the date is an estimate rather than a fact.

The first is the one that gets written about, because it is the only one that looks like a date.

What an unlock does and does not tell you

It tells you supply that can move now can move. It does not tell you that it will. Tokens released to a long-term treasury and tokens released to an early investor behave nothing alike, and the schedule alone does not distinguish them.

The questions worth asking are: who receives this tranche, what have previous recipients of the same tranche done, and is any of it already hedged or pre-sold off-chain. None of those are answered by the headline number.

Verify it against the chain

A schedule is usually a contract, and a contract is readable.

• Find the vesting or timelock contract and look at its balance over time. A drop is a release, and the transaction shows where it went.
• Check whether the token contract can mint. A supply cap that lives only in a document is not a cap.
• Watch the recipient address afterwards, not just the unlock block. The interesting movement is the next hop.

How to read the Nura Chain explorer covers the mechanics of following a balance and a transfer, and the same method works on any EVM chain.

Nura Coin's own numbers

Total supply is 1,000,000,000 NURA. How that is divided, what each portion is for and what is held back is set out in Nura Coin supply and allocation, which is the page to read rather than this one for any figure specific to this network.

The general habit is the one worth keeping: read the schedule before you need it, check it against the contract, and treat any unlock article — including this one — as a prompt to go and look rather than a conclusion.