A TON DeFi liquidity protocol completed its TGE in early 2025. The tokenomics were conventional by launchpad standards: 15% to the founding team, 10% to early advisors, 25% to the public sale, 30% to the ecosystem treasury, and 20% to liquidity and market-making reserves. The vesting schedule for team tokens was six months cliff followed by 18 months of linear unlock. The project founders had pushed back on the cliff length during the review process — they wanted three months. The launchpad held the six-month requirement. At the 90-day mark post-TGE, circulating supply was still 100% public-sale tokens and liquidity reserves. The secondary market price held within 20% of the TGE price. At month seven, the first team cliff unlock hit. The price dipped 12% on the unlock day and recovered within two weeks.
That pattern is not coincidence. It is the predictable result of cliff-locked vesting working as designed — concentrating the unlock pressure into a single, anticipated event rather than distributing constant sell pressure across the entire post-TGE window.
The Math Behind Cliff-Locked Vesting
Linear vesting without a cliff releases tokens at a constant rate from day one of the TGE. If a founder holds 15 million tokens from a 100 million total supply, linear vesting over 24 months without a cliff means 625,000 tokens enter the founder's transferable balance every month. From the perspective of secondary market participants, the ceiling on sell pressure is always present — every month, the potential sell-side increases by the unvested monthly tranche.
A six-month cliff changes this materially. For the first six months, zero additional supply enters the founder's transferable balance. Circulating supply is static — it consists only of what was distributed at TGE: the public sale allocation, the liquidity provision, and any ecosystem grants that were unlocked at launch. The market price signal over this period is not contaminated by anticipated insider supply. Buyers know exactly when the first cliff unlock occurs and can price that event in advance.
After the cliff, 18 months of linear vesting begins. At month 7, the founder receives the cliff tranche: in a typical configuration, this is 0% at TGE, 0% through month 6, then a lump cliff release followed by monthly linear distribution. The cliff release itself — typically between 5% and 15% of the total founder allocation — is the most visible unlock event. But because it is on a published, immutable schedule, the market has had six months to price it.
The "Soft Rug" Pattern and What Cliffs Prevent
The launchpad era of 2021–2023 produced a documented pattern that the crypto community named the "soft rug": a project completes its public sale at an elevated FDV (fully diluted valuation), teams hold tokens on short vesting schedules, and systematic selling begins within weeks of TGE as each linear tranche unlocks. Unlike an outright rug pull — where project accounts are drained and abandoned — the soft rug is slower: price decays over three to six months as insider supply consistently exceeds market demand. The project technically continues to exist; the token price does not.
"A six-month cliff does not prevent founders from eventually selling. It prevents them from selling before they have built anything worth buying."
The cliff functions as an alignment mechanism: a founder who is going to be locked for six months has a direct financial interest in the project's value being higher at month seven than at TGE. A founder on linear-from-day-one vesting can begin selling on day two. These are different incentive structures, and they produce measurably different founder behavior patterns over the 90-day window that determines whether a project retains its community or loses it.
Tonstarter's Vesting Contracts: FunC-Immutable On-Chain
Vesting contracts on Tonstarter are written in FunC, TON's native smart contract language, and deployed to the TON mainnet at TGE. The deployment is immutable: once the vesting schedule is encoded and the contract is live, the cliff date and linear unlock rate cannot be changed without deploying a replacement contract — which would require moving tokens to the new contract, an action that would be publicly visible and immediately suspicious to any secondary market participant tracking the treasury wallet.
This immutability is not a limitation — it is the point. The value of a cliff-locked vesting schedule is only as good as its enforcement. An off-chain promise to hold tokens for six months is worth less than an on-chain contract that makes transfer impossible before the cliff date. TONviewer and other TON network explorers allow any participant to independently verify the vesting contract state, the lockup end date, and the current unlocked balance.
Multi-Sig Treasury Wallets
Team and treasury vesting contracts are paired with multi-signature wallet requirements for the release addresses. This means that even after a cliff unlock releases a tranche to the founder's vesting wallet, transferring tokens from that wallet requires signature authorization from multiple designated signers — typically two of three or three of five, depending on the project structure. The multi-sig threshold prevents a single founder from unilaterally liquidating a cliff tranche immediately on unlock day.
The multi-sig configuration is not optional on Tonstarter for team and advisor allocations above a defined threshold. It is a structural requirement, reviewed during the project onboarding process, before the vesting contract is deployed.
What Founders Push Back On (and Where We Hold)
The most common founder objection to a six-month cliff is a liquidity argument: "We have operational expenses that require token sales before month seven." This argument occasionally has merit — a project with real infrastructure costs and no fiat runway needs some path to operational financing. The appropriate response is not to shorten the cliff; it is to structure a pre-cliff operating reserve in a separate budget category, allocated in stablecoins or TON at TGE, that covers six months of operations without touching the vested founder allocation.
We are not saying a six-month cliff is the right answer for every project structure. We are saying that any cliff shorter than four months produces a vesting curve that is difficult to distinguish from no cliff at all from a secondary market perspective. A three-month cliff with 12-month linear vesting means the bulk of team supply is tradeable at month 15 — which is close enough to immediate that the behavioral alignment effect largely disappears.
The second common push back is on advisor vesting. Advisors often argue they should have shorter cliffs and faster vesting because they are not full-time team members. The response: advisors should have shorter vesting periods than founders, but still with a cliff. A typical configuration on Tonstarter is a four-month cliff and 12-month linear for advisors versus a six-month cliff and 18–24-month linear for founding team members. Advisor allocations are also typically capped at 3–7% of total supply — generous enough to attract meaningful contributors, constrained enough that advisor unlocks do not dominate secondary market sell pressure.
- Founding team: 6-month cliff, 18–24-month linear vesting
- Advisors: 4-month cliff, 12-month linear vesting
- Early strategic contributors: 3-month cliff, 12-month linear vesting
- Public sale participants: Typically 0–3-month cliff, 6–12-month linear depending on sale tier
- Ecosystem/Treasury: Governed by DAO or multi-sig with release conditions beyond pure calendar vesting
Past launchpad raises do not predict future token performance. Vesting schedules reduce one category of structural risk — insider sell pressure — but they do not determine whether a project's product finds adoption, whether the macro market cooperates with the TGE timing, or whether the team executes on its roadmap. What they do is remove the easiest and most common path to value extraction at the expense of public sale participants.
Tonstarter's vesting framework and available schedule configurations are detailed at vesting.html. If your project is preparing for a TON launchpad sale, the application process at apply.html includes a vesting structure review as part of the compliance assessment.
