What is a token allocation, and how do you read one?

The usual slices

CoinMarketCap says most tokens launched in recent years split their supply into named buckets: a public float, a team allocation, early investors, an ecosystem or treasury fund, and community incentives.¹ Each bucket usually comes with its own vesting schedule.¹

• Team. The people building the project. Uniswap's table says "team members and future employees", and Arbitrum's puts advisors in the same row as the team.^5,6
• Investors. CoinMarketCap calls them early investors. Uniswap and Arbitrum both list them as a separate slice.^1,5,6
• Treasury or ecosystem fund. Tokens kept for grants, partnerships, developer support and incentives. CoinMarketCap says token holders, or a council they elect, often decide how this fund is spent.⁷
• Community. Airdrops, rewards and grants for users. Some go to people who used a product before it had a token, based on what they did.⁸
• Liquidity. Tokens set aside so the token can trade. Binance says market makers are often involved in token launches and early listings to support liquidity. Module 19 covers the deals they sign.⁹

Two real tables

In September 2020, Uniswap Labs said 1 billion UNI had been created at launch and would become available over four years.⁵

Uniswap said 15% of all UNI could be claimed straight away by past users. The treasury's UNI would vest over four years, and team, investor and advisor UNI would be locked up on the same schedule.^10,5

Arbitrum's governance documents give ARB an initial supply cap of 10 billion. They list how it was split once two governance proposals, AIPs 1.1 and 1.2, had passed.^11,6

Reading a table

1. Check that it adds up to 100%. Uniswap's four rows do: 60 + 21.266 + 18.044 + 0.69 = 100.⁵
2. Add up the insiders. At Uniswap, team, investors and advisors got 40% between them. At Arbitrum, the team and investor rows make 44.47%.^5,6
3. Check when each slice unlocks. CoinMarketCap says who holds the supply, and when they can sell, is the part of tokenomics most likely to move the price. Lessons 4 and 5 show how to read a release schedule.¹
4. Check who controls the treasury. CoinMarketCap says the rules for spending a treasury show how fast its tokens can reach the market, and who decides.⁷

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) supports central banks' work on monetary and financial stability. In 2021, an article by three authors in the BIS Quarterly Review said many blockchains give a substantial part of their first coins to insiders, which makes concentration worse.² It said every decentralised finance (DeFi) platform has some centralisation, which typically revolves around holders of governance tokens, often the platform's developers, who vote on proposals.² The article gives the authors' views, not necessarily the BIS's.²

Concentration on the chain

Holdings are public. On Etherscan, a token's Holders tab lists every holder, in order of how much they hold and what percentage that is.⁴ Module 11 shows how to use it.⁴

A 2026 working paper by researchers at the European Central Bank (ECB) used Etherscan data to study four DeFi governance tokens: Aave, MakerDAO, Ampleforth and Uniswap.³

• Many addresses, few owners. Each token was held by tens or hundreds of thousands of addresses, yet in October 2022 and May 2023 the top 100 held over 80% of each.³
• The very top. For Aave and Uniswap, the top 5 holders had almost half of all tokens in 2022.³
• Who they are. The authors linked around half or more of the holdings to the projects themselves or to exchanges.³
• A caution. Their data could not tell an exchange's own tokens apart from those it holds for customers.³
• Whose view. The paper says it gives the authors' views, not the ECB's.³