Cold Thoughts on Chip Structure: Who Is Guarding the Chips During the Lock-up Period (Cliff)?
The biggest fear in investing is not the drop in coin prices, but not knowing where the bottom is. However, at this point in February 2026, looking at the $0.09 XPL, I instead feel a rare sense of security. This sense of security comes from a term that many people do not understand: Cliff (Lock-up Period).
Flipping through the white paper on Plasma's token economics, you will discover an interesting phenomenon: although the total supply reaches 10 billion tokens, the current circulation is only around 18%. More crucially, at this very moment, we are in a strong lock-up window for the core team and early investors (including Founders Fund and Bitfinex).
What does this mean? It means that those “whales” holding massive amounts of chips cannot move their coins, just like you. In this price range, there is no selling pressure from the project side or the primary market. The current decline is more about the self-sabotage of retail investors' emotions. This “forced lock-up” has, in fact, built a temporary community of interests between institutions and retail investors.
Think from another perspective: if you are Peter Thiel or the development team of Plasma, and your chips can only be gradually released over the next few years, would you allow the coin price to languish at $0.09? Obviously not. They are more motivated than anyone else to grow the ecosystem and bring the coin price back to the valued range before the unlocking period arrives. Therefore, the current “calm” is not the silence of death, but the buildup of funds waiting to move when they cannot sell. For retail investors, establishing a position at this level where institutions are “trapped” (or locked) is essentially swimming in the moat of the big players.
[Suggested to insert image: XPL Token Release Timeline (Vesting Schedule), highlighting that the current time point is in the “low release slope” flat area]
In this market, even the manipulators are forced to be “friends of time,” so why rush to cut losses?
$XPL
