Receiving an airdrop notification feels like a win, until you open your wallet and discover that only a fraction of your tokens can actually be moved. That is vesting at work. Instead of handing out the full allocation on day one, many projects release tokens gradually over months, and sometimes over years, to keep early recipients from selling everything at once and crashing the price.

A vesting schedule is simply the timetable a project uses to unlock tokens. A common pattern is a cliff followed by linear release: nothing unlocks for, say, three months, and then a fixed amount unlocks each month after that. Another pattern releases a percentage at launch, such as 25 percent, with the rest spread evenly across the following year. The exact schedule is always written in the project's tokenomics documentation, and reading it before you claim is one of the smartest habits an airdrop hunter can build.