Research · Measured 6–9 October 2026

Unclaimed token vesting: what happens after tokens unlock

Most analysis of token vesting stops at the unlock date. This study looks at what happens next. We read about 1,280,000 finished vesting schedules across 8 protocols, on EVM chains and Solana, directly from their contracts, and measured how many of them still hold tokens their recipient never collected.

Key findings

1. Unclaimed tokens are common. The share of finished schedules still holding tokens ranges from 2.9% on Jupiter Lock to 87% on Unvest. On Sablier, the largest protocol measured, it is about 1 in 3 once a single airdrop is excluded. Rates are highest where airdrops dominate, and many airdrop recipients may never know the tokens are there.
2. People claim everything or nothing. Nearly 9 in 10 unclaimed schedules (between 78% and 97%, depending on the protocol) were never claimed once. Partial claimers are rare, and on Streamflow 148 of 150 of them made their last claim before the schedule ended.
3. Most of it is worth nothing, but not all of it. 87% of unclaimed Sablier streams are in tokens that no longer have a market. At the other end, a Hedgey plan worth about $152,000, in a token with a market deep enough to sell it, finished 15 months before measurement and was never touched, and an ARB grant worth about $27,000 had sat untouched for more than two years.
4. Headline figures are easily distorted. One airdrop was 61% of all unclaimed Sablier streams, and single team or treasury lockups were worth millions. Every figure below states what was excluded and why.
5. Push completes; pull often doesn’t. On Superfluid, which can pay the same kind of schedule either way, 95% of automatic schedules started as designed, while a third of claim-based ones (450 of 1,310) were never claimed. See below.
6. Third-party data often disagrees with the chain. One protocol’s index kept 2,628 locks as unclaimed after they had been moved and emptied on-chain; another disagreed with the chain on 17.5% of contracts. Every figure here was checked against the contracts.

Results by protocol

*Value counts only tokens with at least $10,000 of DEX liquidity on the schedule’s own chain, priced from DexScreener at measurement. Rates use different units per protocol (stated under each figure) and should not be averaged or summed. Download the table as CSV.

Superfluid: the same payment, pushed or pulled

Superfluid’s vesting scheduler can pay a schedule automatically, keeping the tokens in the payer’s wallet until an automation service starts the stream, or it can ask the recipient to claim, with a deadline after which the schedule can never start. Because both run on the same protocol, they show how much the payment model alone changes the outcome.

Measured 2026-10-18 from Superfluid’s own vesting-scheduler indexes on Ethereum, Base, Optimism, Polygon, Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Gnosis, Avalanche. Finished means the schedule’s end date was more than 30 days before measurement. On a schedule past its claim deadline the tokens never left the payer’s wallet, so nothing is left for the recipient to collect.

How it was measured

• Coverage varies by protocol. Sablier was measured through Sablier’s own indexer, which covers every chain it is deployed on (25 EVM chains, more than Vestream itself tracks); the chains outside Vestream’s coverage hold under 2% of Sablier’s finished streams. The other protocols run on between one and six chains each, including Solana. Each protocol’s chains are listed in the table.
• Finished means the schedule’s end date was more than 30 days before measurement (before 6 September 2026).
• Unclaimed means more than 1% of the schedule’s total is still held for the recipient. Never claimed means nothing was ever withdrawn.
• Sources. Each protocol was read from its own contracts or program accounts: Sablier from its live indexer with on-chain spot checks; Hedgey from its event history on all four plan contracts; UNCX, Team Finance and Smithii directly from contract and vault balances; Unvest from its subgraph, reconciled to on-chain balances; Streamflow and Jupiter Lock from seeded random samples of 6,000 accounts each.
• Exclusions. Testnets, test-named tokens, cancelled or revoked schedules, and schedules where the recipient is the project itself (a team locking or streaming to its own wallet) are excluded, so the figures describe tokens owed to someone else.
• Verification. For each protocol, the largest positions were re-read on-chain to confirm the contract still holds the tokens and the recipient can claim them today. All passed.
• Value. Mark-to-market at DexScreener prices, then capped at each token’s pool depth, because several positions are larger than the market for their token. Unpriced tokens count as zero.

Limitations

• Not every vesting protocol can be measured this way. Magna only reveals an allocation once it is claimed, and streaming payroll protocols (LlamaPay, Sablier Flow) have no “finished and waiting” state, so they are not included. Superfluid is reported separately above, because only its claim-based schedules can be left waiting.
• PinkSale is being measured and will be added when complete.
• Two protocols are sampled rather than censused; their rates carry the confidence intervals shown.
• “Unclaimed” does not always mean forgotten. Some recipients may be choosing not to claim, for example when a position is worth less than the fee to claim it. Others may never have known an airdrop existed, or may have lost access to the wallet.
• This is a snapshot. Claims made after measurement are not reflected.

Citing this research

The data on this page is published under CC BY 4.0: you can reuse it with attribution. Suggested citation:

Pearce, H. (2026). Unclaimed token vesting: what happens after tokens unlock. Vestream. https://www.vestream.io/research/unclaimed-vesting

This research was carried out by Vestream, which tracks token vesting. Check a wallet for unclaimed vestings.