Token Unlocks List: Price Volatility Looms as HBAR, 1Inch and GAL Among Unlocking Projects Worth Millions
Which token will unlock this week? | Credit: Shutterstock
- This article is updated regularly to track the latest token unlocks – and their potential impact on prices
- A significant increase in supply could lower the price of some tokens
- All token unlocks are creating a ripple of uncertainty among investors
This week, numerous well-known tokens are set for significant unlocks as the cryptocurrency industry continues to develop. These unlocks have the potential to have a big impact on the market dynamics and supply of individual cryptocurrencies. Three of the most interesting, are HBAR, 1Inch and GAL, projects that have initiated investors’ interest with their unlock announcements. When a project’s tokens are released, some early investors, pre-seed round participants, team members, and developers are unable to sell their shares on the open market. Those tokens are locked for a set amount of time.
However, once unlocked, holders can sell their tokens on the open market. The price of such tokens may fall at times due to increased selling pressure.
How Does Unlocking Tokens Impact Price
Token unlocks refer to releasing a certain amount of assets previously locked or banned from circulation in the crypto market. Unlocking tokens usually strongly impacts market liquidity, trading volume and overall market dynamics and price volatility.
Tokens are usually locked to preserve the crypto price’s stability, and halt the possible big sell-offs. When a large number of cryptos flood the market , the oversupply can show some downward pressure on the price. However, sometimes, if the project is strong and has strong community support, the impact on the price can be quite positive as more investors are lured in.
In cases of HBAR, 1Inch and GAL, its clear token unlock is creating a ripple of uncertainty among investors.
HBAR Unlock
On September 1st, Hedera will hold its subsequent token-unlocking even t. 1.5 billion HBAR tokens will be made available for use in network governance-related procedures, purchase agreements, etc.
This is equivalent to 3.48 percent of the token’s current supply. The estimated value of the unlocked tokens is $65 million.
The release of 332.24 million HBAR for network governance & related operations, 416.69 million HBAR for purchase agreements, and 403.53 million HBAR for ecosystem & open-source development are all part of the unlock distribution, according to Token Unlock.
A total of 50 billion HBAR tokens are available, of which 33.03 million are in circulation right now. This is equivalent to 66% of the entire supply of the token. After the token unlock event is over, only 130 million HBAR tokens will be locked.
After being added to the FedNow platform by the U.S. Federal Reserve, HBAR jumped 15% earlier this month. This contributed to a 50% price increase since mid-June that increased its market cap to over $2 billion.
1Inch Unlock
1inch Network [1INCH] will unlock new tokens on August 31,2023, which will increase its circulating supply. As per Token Unlock , over 64.290 1INCH tokens worth $$15.570 will be unlocked, accounting for 0.03% of the total supply.
As of now, nearly 72% of 1INCH’s total supply worth $1.08 billion is locked, which will be released over time. Less likely to affect pricing are these lower releases.
According to the official website , community reward schemes will receive 30% of all the tokens. 14.5% more comes from the growth and development fund, which will be applied to grant applications and to encourage software developers to expand on 1inch protocols. Backers and core contributors will receive the tokens that are left over.
GAL Unlock
Galxe token GAL will unlock 416,670 pieces (about $496,000) at 20:00:00 on September 5th , accounting for 0.90% of the total supply. According to the company’s blog , Galxe aims to build a permissionless, open, and collaborative credential data network. The GAL token is an essential component to such infrastructures as it functions as the governance token, incentivizes user participation, and serves as the primary payment token of the Project Galxe ecosystem.
Older Unlocks
Unlocks for tokens happen at regular intervals for some, and more sporadically for others — but they often have big implications on the price of different tokens.
OP Unlock
On June 30, investors and core contributors will receive the cliff Optimism unlock . There will be around 24,16 million OP tokens released, of represents 0.56% of total supply. Around 0.30% of tokens will go to the core distributors, while 0.27% will go to investors. At the current pricing , the value of all of these tokens is more than $862 million. The price of OP increased by 13.7% in the past week.
The OP token unlock coincides with Optimism receiving sign-ons from significant initiatives in the cryptocurrency space. For example, in February, Coinbase committed to leveraging Optimism’s technology to create its own rollup, a scaling mechanism that resolves transactions on Ethereum. In May, the contentious Worldcoin project also declared that it intended to leverage Optimism’s mainnet for its identity solution.
On June 6, Bedrock, a new release, used by both Coinbase and Worldcoin, went live.
Vesting refers to the gradual delivery of tokens to parties like investors, core team members, and advisers in the context of digital assets. It’s a popular practice intended to encourage recipients of token allocations to commit to longer-term time commitments.
Vesting structures can take many different shapes; for example, Optimism has a “cliff” where numerous tokens are distributed at once.
Of course, liquidity mining techniques, in which tokens are offered to encourage particular user behaviors, are another way that token supply are continuously increased. These processes are not limited to vested token allocations.
A major portion of OP tokens are still either frozen or have not yet been distributed by the project’s foundation, despite the market leaders’ demonstrations of faith in the token. This has caused some unhappiness in the community.
SUI Unlock
SUI attracted a lot of interest during its successful introduction. Nevertheless, only a small portion of its tokens are now in use.
Less than 10% of SUI’s tokens are now in use, and more than 61 million tokens are slated to be released on July 3. Less than 1% of the total token supply is represented by this predicted unlock, which is valued at approximately $48 million. The Foundation and the Community Access Program would receive the unlocked tokens. Ten billion tokens are the maximum and overall SUI supply. There are barely 28 million in use right now. So it is reasonable to anticipate a brief price drop. 93.83% more SUI tokens remain locked. Sui presently has a $396 million market cap. A layer 1 blockchain, SUI provides a fun setting for playing blockchain games. They employ the brand-new Move programming language.
This next token unlock has a lot of promise for SUI because it will increase the number of tokens available on the market.
A price rising trend was present for SUI. Priced at roughly $0.73 , it fell by more than 3%. SUI’s Relative Strength Index (RSI) continued to trade below 50, indicating that the market’s overall mood remains bearrish.
AGIX Unlock
AGIX is the native token of SingularityNET, a blockchain-based platform that makes it simple for anybody to “build, share, and monetize” AI services. Users are encouraged to browse, evaluate, and purchase those AI services using AGIX in the SingularityNET marketplace.
According to the Token Unlock , on June 28, 10 million tokens will be unlocked.
The current price of AGIX is $0.24, and the trading volume in the past 24 hours is $32,045,493. SingularityNET has experienced a decrease of 1.5% in the last 24 hours.
It is currently ranked #105 on CoinMarketCap , with a market cap of $289,961,844.
After the unlock, AGIX could encounter resistance near the $0.3040 level if its price rises to the top of its trading range. If this occurs, purchasers will probably aggressively support the price, which might then go up further. AGIX can therefore benefit much more in this situation.
On the other hand, if AGIX’s price reaches a significant support level of roughly $0.2451, it may experience a sell-off or a sharp collapse. However, traders may see AGIX breaking over the top of its trading range if the price fails to reach that level of support.
BLUR Unlock
On June 15th, investors and core contributors will receive the first BLUR cliff unlock . There will be 196 million BLUR tokens released, of which 115.7 million belong to core contributors and 75 million to investors. At the current pricing , the value of all of these tokens is more than $62 million.
The amount of BLUR that will soon be unlocked will be close to 40% of the 494 million units that are now in circulation.
Assuming demand remains constant, as the basic principles of economics would predict, releasing that much fresh supply might cause prices to decline. But the unlock also comes after a significant sell-off this past weekend that lowered the value of tokens that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) classified as securities and occurred a few days later. Even though BLUR was not mentioned by the SEC, it had a weekend decline of more than 20%.
According to Token Unlocks, 83% of all BLUR tokens are still locked.
APE Unlock
On June 16, ApeCoin (APE) will release 15.6 million tokens , or 1.56% of the entire supply worth around $35.5 million. The market may experience volatility as a result of the release of this significant amount as investors respond to the additional supply.
The creators of the largest Non-Fungible Token (NFT) collection in the world, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Yuga Labs, introduced the cryptocurrency token ApeCoin in 2022. The Bored Ape Yacht Club ecosystem was where the token was intended to be spent.
Holders of BAYC NFTs received rewards through APE as well. However, since the amount of BAYC traded has decreased over the past few months, the coin’s appeal has dwindled. According to data gathered by CoinMarketCap , the total volume of the cryptocurrency during the last 24 hours has been roughly $81 million.
BIT Unlock
BitDAO (BIT) will unlock 187 million tokens worth $79.3 million on June 15th. This substantial supply release accounts for 1.88% of the overall supply. Such a large unlock has the potential to put a lot of tokens into circulation, which could exacerbate market volatility.
BitDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization dedicated to funding and assisting various blockchain projects. Even while a rapid flood of tokens could lead to a short-term fall, the project’s long-term success will depend on its capacity to add value to the ecosystem and form strategic alliances with other important companies in the sector.
According to CoinMarketCap data , the price of the token went up by 1.80% to $0.43 at the time of writing. The project is expected to have a significant impact on the overall market dynamics throughout the month.
Over $633 million has already been allotted for projects as of this point. The most recent to gain from this is zkDAO, which received $200 million. BitDAO’s $200 million investment to zkDAO will be distributed in several crypto asset tranches, with the first tranche being worth $40 million and determined by the project’s success and a community vote on governance.
BitDAO is constantly looking for fresh proposals and presently has $2.5 billion in its treasury.
The HOP Unlock
Christopher Whinfrey launched the Hop Protocol, an innovative and user-friendly token-bridging program, in 2021. Hop Protocol enables users to transmit popular cryptocurrencies such as ETH, MATIC, and USDT between the Ethereum Mainnet and L2 networks with ease.
Hop enables tokens to be sent swiftly and securely from rollups and their accompanying layer-1 networks to L2 solutions on other blockchains. It is a scalable rollup-to-rollup general token bridge for Ethereum’s layer-2 ecosystem, allowing users to transfer tokens from one rollup to another.
Hop provides one of the most effective bridging solutions in the ecosystem. This is due, among other things, to the fact that Hop reached $1 billion in transfer volume only six months after its start and over $130 million in Total Value Locked (TVL) at its height.
The distribution of Hop Protocol (HOP) is as follows:
- 6.25% is allocated to Private Sale
- 22.45% is allocated to the Team
- 60.50% is allocated to HopDAO
- 2.80% is allocated to Future Team
- 8.00% is allocated to Airdrop
In May, Hop Protocol announced it is considering awarding a quarter of the tokens they helped secure to people who helped prevent $315,000 worth of its governance token HOP from being seized by aggressive airdrop producers last year. DeFi protocols provide tokens — or “airdrop” — to early users and supporters in order to establish decentralisation autonomous organizations that oversee protocol development. Last year, the crypto bridge airdropped $3.5 million worth of tokens in an effort to launch Hop DAO.
HOP prices are down 4.95% to $0.0.73 at the time of writing.
It is predicted that the value of Hop Protocol could drop by -18.49% after the unlock and reach $ 0.058 by June 13, 2023. According to technical indicators, the current sentiment is Bearish while the Fear & Greed Index is showing 50 (Neutral). Hop Protocol recorded 14/30 (47%) green days with 9.02% price volatility over the last 30 days. Based on our Hop Protocol forecast, it’s now a bad time to buy Hop Protocol
1Inch Unlock
Previous unlocks have reduced the price of 1INCH . The 1INCH price has never recovered from the prior four unlocks, according to data.
The token price plummeted 27% in the two weeks following the December 2021 unlock. The second unlock in June 2022 reduced the 1INCH price by 40% in the same period, while the third unlock in December 2022 reduced the token’s worth by another 20%.
At the time of writing the coin was down by 1.24% to $0.323.
The reason for the price drop is because, while some investors may hold their 1INCH tokens after unlocking them, many others will sell, flooding the market and causing supply to exceed demand.
Accounts affiliated with the infamous Alameda Research, for example, sold 1INCH tokens instantly during the one of the previous unlocks, whereas Binance and Pantera Capital accounts maintained their part.
According to the protocol’s periodic unlock schedule, 1inch will release 21,429 tokens, each worth $7,908 at the time of publication.
The unlock quantity is only 0.001 of the total supply cap. On June 2, 1inch unlocked $100 million worth of its token (16.65% of total supply); and was immediately down over 8%. Holders should brace themselves for additional volatility with the forthcoming unlock on June 10. The coin is projected to continue its downward trajectory even before the next unlock in a few days, according to the analysis .
Conclusion
In most cases, cryptocurrencies going through a token unlock event tend to underperform. That’s what’s happening with 1INCH, which is already 96% off its all-time high of $7.874. Also, as it could be seen in the BLUR case, with BLUR incentives and a high TVL of 76,490 ETH, the potential upside for BLUR is still possible. However, traders need to exercise caution and weigh the risks of the token unlock as well as any potential effects on the price of BLUR.
To understand the value of a cryptocurrency, investors need to look at both the total supply and the circulating supply. This can help them make informed decisions about buying and selling based on the cryptocurrency’s potential supply and demand dynamics.
