Plasma can ship great tech and still trade like every other liquid token, because price doesn’t move on architecture first — it moves on flow. The simplest way to look at it is: if more $XPL becomes sellable faster than new buyers show up, price feels pressure. If demand grows faster than liquid supply, unlocks get absorbed and the chart holds up.
When people say “supply,” they usually mean one number. In reality there are two different supply engines that matter for price pressure. The first is the genesis supply — the tokens that exist from day one but aren’t all liquid at once. The second is ongoing issuance — emissions that can mint new tokens over time through validator rewards. Unlocks create “availability” of supply; emissions create “fresh” supply. Both can push on price, but they do it in different ways.
On the unlock side, the important thing isn’t just how many tokens exist, it’s where the unlocks sit and who receives them. Different holders behave differently. Public sale buyers tend to be the most sensitive to early volatility and the quickest to take profit during the first big move. Ecosystem recipients (incentives, liquidity rewards, campaign distributions) are usually the most consistent sellers because they treat tokens like yield — something to harvest and convert, not necessarily hold long-term. Investors typically sell into strength or manage risk around major vesting events. Teams are often slower and more constrained, but when their tokens become liquid, the market still prices the optionality to sell. Then you have validators and delegators later on, who become a structural seller cohort because rewards arrive continuously and operators often sell a portion to cover costs.
That’s why vesting shape matters as much as vesting size. A cliff is psychologically different from a smooth monthly schedule. Before a cliff, supply is locked and price can rally on thinner float, but everyone knows a “permission moment” is coming — the date when a group gains the ability to sell. As you approach that moment, markets often start to trade it like an event: some participants front-run with pre-selling, others wait to buy the post-unlock reaction. At the cliff itself, the question isn’t “will it unlock?” — it will. The question is whether the order book can absorb it without breaking structure. After the cliff, if the schedule turns into a predictable monthly stream, the market usually adapts, but that stream can still cap upside unless demand expands.
Ecosystem unlocks are their own kind of pressure. They often don’t show up as one violent candle. They show up as a slow leak — regular incentives, LP rewards, integrations funded with tokens, campaigns that drop tokens into the hands of users who immediately sell because it feels like free money. Even if the intent is growth, the market experiences it as additional sell flow. That’s why you’ll sometimes see a token “feel heavy” even without dramatic unlock events: it’s not a single dump, it’s constant distribution.
Then there’s emissions, which is where supply turns from “schedule-driven” into “structural.” Unlocks are finite — once everything vests, that part ends. Emissions don’t end unless the protocol changes them. The real price question once emissions are live is not just the inflation rate on paper, but the sell-through rate in practice. If most rewards are staked, compounded, or held, emissions add supply without immediately becoming sell pressure. If validators and delegators routinely sell rewards (which is common for operations, risk management, and taxes), then emissions become a steady drip into the market. In weak demand environments, that drip can grind price down slowly. In strong demand environments, it can be invisible.
The only native counterweight is burn. If base fees are burned, usage can offset issuance. But burn isn’t guaranteed — it depends on activity that generates fees. If a big portion of the chain’s most common actions are designed to be very cheap or sponsored, then meaningful burn has to come from broader economic activity: contracts, apps, MEV dynamics, general transaction load. So the tug-of-war is simple: unlocks plus emissions expand supply; burn plus adoption absorbs it.
When you compress all of this into a tradable framework, you end up with a few practical questions that matter more than narratives. How much new supply becomes liquid each month relative to real float, not just total supply? Who is receiving that supply — long-term holders, incentive farmers, funds, or operators who need to sell? Are the big unlock moments clustered into cliffs or smoothed into streams? When emissions fully activate, what portion of rewards is likely to be sold? And finally, is network usage strong enough that burn meaningfully reduces net new supply?
That’s the supply-and-unlocks story in one line: $XPL price pressure is not mysterious. It’s the collision of a known unlock schedule, the behavior of the holders receiving tokens, and whether real demand grows fast enough to absorb that flow.