Here is a party trick that works depressingly often. Show us a token's circulating float, its FDV and its next two unlock dates, and we will sketch its chart for the next quarter without knowing what the project does. Not because we are clever, but because supply schedules are public, mechanical and relentlessly underpriced by people who only look at the ticker.
The three numbers that matter
Maximum supply is how many tokens will ever exist (some tokens have none, which is its own signal). Circulating supply is what can trade today. Float is circulating supply as a share of maximum, and it is the single most predictive number on the page.
Price times circulating supply gives market cap, the number everyone quotes. Price times maximum supply gives FDV, the number that tells the truth. When a token trades at a 300 million market cap and a 3 billion FDV, the market is valuing the project at 3 billion while only 10 percent of the supply has been forced to find a real buyer. The other 90 percent is coming, on a schedule, mostly held by people whose cost basis rounds to zero.
That does not make the token a scam or a certain loser. It makes it a token whose future includes structural selling that present price does not have to absorb yet. You are not early; you are pre-dilution.
The unlock calendar, or where price action is scheduled
Locked supply does not stay locked. Teams, investors, foundations and ecosystem funds vest on published schedules, and the two shapes to know are the cliff, a large tranche unlocking on one date, and linear vesting, a steady drip. Cliffs are the dangerous ones. A team cliff releasing several percent of total supply in one day is a known, dated event that still, reliably, surprises the people holding the bag that morning.
Before touching any token, find its vesting page or an unlock tracker and answer three questions. When is the next cliff and how big is it relative to average daily volume? Who unlocks, insiders with a near-zero cost basis or community programs? And is a major exchange listing conveniently scheduled near a large unlock, because liquidity events and unlock events attract each other, as we cover in how listings work.
Points and airdrop math, done before the claim
Airdrop hunters get a special edition of this problem. When a points season converts to tokens, the conversion silently defines what your grind was worth, and you can estimate it ahead of the reveal. Take the announced community allocation as a share of supply, apply a plausible FDV range from comparable projects, divide by total points issued, and you get a value per point, bracketed low and high. Run that math the day tokenomics publish and you will know whether claiming and holding, claiming and selling, or not bothering to bridge for the claim is the rational move, hours before the influencers finish arguing.
One more airdrop-specific trap: the claim-day float illusion. Airdropped supply is circulating on paper, but on claim day it behaves like an unlock cliff, an entire cohort with zero cost basis gaining its first access to deep liquidity. This is why so many airdrop tokens print their all-time high in the first hours and spend months below it. The pattern is structural, not moral.
A five-minute checklist
- Float: what share of maximum supply circulates today? Under 15 percent means you are buying a preview, not a market.
- FDV gap: how many multiples separate market cap from FDV? That multiple is future sell pressure wearing a calendar.
- Next cliff: date, size versus daily volume, and whose tokens. An insider cliff above a few days of volume is a real event.
- Allocation split: what share went to community versus team and investors, and on what vesting? Generous community splits with long insider locks age best.
- Emissions: does the protocol continuously mint new tokens as rewards? Perpetual emissions are perpetual sell pressure that a chart cannot hide for long.
None of this requires a spreadsheet PhD or paid tools; every input is public. The asymmetry is that almost nobody spends the five minutes. Spend them, and you will pass on trades that looked obvious and were, in fact, scheduled to fail.
