The $WAL token unlock issue has recently attracted a lot of attention, but not many people truly understand how the unlocking works or what impact it will have on the market. I spent some time studying their release schedule and found several interesting details.

Generally speaking, tokens allocated to the team and advisors are linearly unlocked over four years, which is well-known. However, there are two other aspects that are often overlooked: one is the Ecosystem Growth Fund, which has a more flexible release schedule decided by DAO voting, but still releases a fixed amount each month. The other is the Partner Incentive Pool, which will start gradually releasing tokens to early integrated projects from Q4 of this year.

This means that over the next six months to a year, the market will face not only normal circulating supply but also potential "new supply" from these two sources. While we can monitor the wallets of the team and advisors, predicting how project teams that receive incentives will handle their tokens is more difficult. Some may lock their tokens long-term, while others might sell to subsidize operations.

This kind of selling pressure from different directions is a long-term factor from a structural perspective. It’s not enough to look only at circulating market cap; valuation models must incorporate the impact of these factors.