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Token supply, unlocks, and vesting
Supply is how many tokens exist and who will receive more later. An unlock is a date when locked tokens become sellable. That date is when insiders can get paid.
The unlock is the date insiders can get paid. Your purchase does not delay their date.
A worked case
A chart looks scarce. A document shows a cliff in six weeks when the team and early buyers can sell. The person buys the scarce story. The cliff arrives. The extra supply is the exit they were standing under.
Who receives coins later
Teams, funds, and early buyers often vest. The chart you see may be the price before those coins are free to sell. A cliff is the first day a large block unlocks.
Read the schedule
Find the amount, the date, and the wallet if it is public. A project that will not show the schedule is hiding who gets paid.
An emission that pays stakers by printing new coins is diluting holders. The reward and the dilution are the same coins.
The cliff is the product
Token sales in the 2017 boom, and again in later cycles, often locked team and investor coins and then released them on a schedule. The public chart showed a small float. The documents showed a cliff. When the cliff arrived, the people who had bought cheaper could sell to the people who had bought the story of scarcity. This is not a quirk of one chain. It is how a vesting contract is meant to work. The date is the day insiders are allowed to be paid.
FTX's own FTT token was a concentrated version. The SEC's complaint described the token as part of the fraud, used as collateral and as a signal, while customer money was elsewhere. You do not need to trade the details of that allegation to see the shape: a token the insiders understood better than the public, with supply that was not the number on the homepage.
Read the schedule before the market cap. If you cannot find the date the team can sell, assume the date is soon.
Read it yourself
These links are the record. They are not a recommendation, and they are not instructions. A news story or a court paper can still be wrong about a detail. The check does not change because a famous name is in the story.
Apply the check
Open a question. The line is about this topic. It is not a verdict that anything is safe.
Unlocking holders, if they sell to you.
The contract and the schedule. Often not you.
The unlocked wallets, by selling. Sometimes a contract that can change the schedule.
Check yourself
Is a locked team allocation harmless?
Not after it unlocks. That is when they can sell.
After this you can find the next unlock and who receives it before you treat a price as the whole story.