Nearly $1.5 billion in tokens from major crypto projects are set to be unlocked in August, with 1 billion XRP tokens — worth $609 million at current prices — making up a massive part of the month’s total on Aug 1.
Ripple, the firm behind the XRP Ledger and the native token XRP, has unlocked up to 1 billion tokens on the first day of every month since 2017. It uses several main escrow wallets, including Ripple (24) and Ripple (25), to evenly split the unlocks each month.
However, Ripple may look to re-lock much of the newly-released XRP. In June, Ripple relocked 800 million XRP from its June 1 unlock, however it still made moves to sell around 300 million XRP — worth $182 million at the time — according to data from TradingView.
While up to 1 billion XRP tokens are unlocked at the start of each month, the actual amount of XRP that would be released into circulation is “likely much less than this” due to a re-escrow process, wrote XRP ledger in a 2017 blog post.
Other major unlocks in August include those from layer-1 network Avalanche and cross-chain bridging platform Wormhole, releasing a combined $449 million worth of tokens, per Token Unlocks data.
Wormhole (W) will unlock 33.3% of its circulating supply — 600 million W tokens with a current market value of $180.5 million — on Aug. 3. It comes after conducting its long-awaited airdrop launch on April 4.
On Aug. 20, Avalanche will unlock 2.4% of the circulating supply of AVAX AVAXUSD tokens, amounting to 9.4 million AVAX with a current market value of $268 million.
Tokens unlocking on the first day of August
Other than XRP, another three projects, including layer-1 network Sui, decentralized exchange dYdX, and “universal” blockchain ZetaChain will also unlock significant portions of their supply on the first day of August.
Sui will unlock 2.56% of its circulating supply, releasing 64 million tokens with a current value of $50 million on Aug. 1.
dYdX will unlock 8.33 million tokens worth nearly $11 million the same day — amounting to 3.65% of its circulating supply. Notably, the tokens will unlock for three groups: investors, founders and staff, and future employees.