Equity · Token cap tables

What a token cap table is, and why it breaks differently.

Allocation buckets instead of share classes, unlocks instead of vesting, and a public ledger your records have to keep agreeing with.

Glide Research11 Aug 202610 min read

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In short

What is a token cap table?

A token cap table is the register of who holds, or has a claim on, a project token. It records allocations by bucket rather than by share class, tracks unlock schedules rather than share issuances, and has to reconcile contractual promises against balances that are visible on a public blockchain.

Allocation buckets · unlock schedules · on-chain balances · no statutory register

Key takeaways

A token cap table records allocation buckets — team, investors, treasury, ecosystem, liquidity, airdrops — not share classes. There is no par value, no authorized-versus-outstanding distinction, and no preference stack.
Unlike a company stock ledger, no statute requires a token register to exist. Delaware corporate law defines a stock ledger and gives stockholders inspection rights; nothing equivalent governs a token allocation table.
Tokens are usually freely transferable the moment they unlock, so a holder list goes stale immediately. The register tracks entitlements and unlocks; the chain tracks balances. The two are different objects.
Across the three public launches compared below, investor allocations clustered near 17% to 18% while core contributor allocations ranged from 19% to 26.94%. No single "standard" split exists to copy.
Circulating supply, total supply, and fully diluted valuation are derived from the unlock schedule. Getting the schedule wrong in a spreadsheet produces wrong headline numbers that markets and journalists then quote back at you.
Most token companies run a token cap table alongside a company cap table, frequently in different entities and jurisdictions. See the dual cap table guide for why reconciling them is the harder problem.

What a token cap table actually records

A company cap table answers one question: who owns the company, and in what order do they get paid. Every row ties back to a share issuance recorded in a legal register, and the totals must reconcile to authorized share counts approved by the board and the stockholders. A token cap table answers a looser question — who is entitled to how much of a fixed or programmatic token supply, and when does that entitlement become a transferable balance.

That difference sounds cosmetic and is not. A share exists because a corporation issued it under corporate law; a token exists because a contract on a blockchain minted it. The share has a legal owner of record. The token has an address holding a balance, and the person controlling that address may or may not be the person your records name. A token cap table is therefore a claims register plus a schedule, sitting next to a public ledger that it can drift out of sync with.

Equity cap table versus token cap table

The two documents look similar in a spreadsheet and behave differently in every respect that matters.

Equity cap table versus token cap table
Feature	Equity cap table	Token cap table
Unit of account	Shares of a class, with a par value and a stated authorized count	Tokens from a fixed or programmatically emitted supply, no par value
Grouping	Share classes and series — common, preferred seed, preferred A	Allocation buckets — team, investors, treasury, ecosystem, airdrop
Legal registerDelaware defines the stock ledger and ties inspection rights to it	A stock ledger recording every holder of record, address, and transfer	No statutory register; the project defines its own record, if any
Time mechanic	Vesting of a grant, with forfeiture on departure	Unlocking of an allocation, often continuing regardless of departure
Transferability	Restricted by charter, bylaws, and securities law; transfers are approved	Usually unrestricted once unlocked; transfers happen without permission
Who can read it	The company, its counsel, and stockholders with inspection rights	Anyone, in part — balances and unlock contracts are publicly visible
Economic rights	A residual claim on the company, ranked by a liquidation preference	Whatever the protocol grants: governance, fee access, staking, or nothing

Stock ledger definition per 8 Del. C. § 219. Token characteristics vary by project — the right-hand column describes the common pattern, not a rule.

The buckets that belong on it

Almost every token cap table decomposes into the same handful of buckets. What differs between projects is the size of each, the unlock treatment, and how honestly the "community" line is described. A bucket labelled ecosystem that is in practice controlled by a single foundation multisig is not community-owned in any meaningful sense, and sophisticated readers will check.

Common allocation buckets and what each one obliges you to track
Bucket	What it covers	What the record has to capture
Core contributors	Founders, employees, and contractors who built the protocol	Per-person allocation, cliff date, unlock curve, leaver treatment, tax withholding basis
Investors	Holders of SAFTs, token warrants, or token side letters that convert into tokens	The instrument each claim came from, conversion mechanics, and any pro-rata or price protection
Treasury / DAO	Supply held for future spending, grants, and governance-directed programmes	Controlling entity, signer set, spend authority, and what has actually been disbursed
Ecosystem and grants	Developer incentives, partner allocations, and integration funding	Committed versus paid, and whether commitments carry their own unlock terms
Liquidity	Supply placed with market makers or into on-chain pools at listing	Loan versus outright transfer, call-option terms, and return dates
Airdrops and user distribution	Retroactive or claim-based distribution to users	Claimed versus unclaimed, claim deadline, and where unclaimed supply reverts
Advisors	Individuals compensated in tokens for advisory work	Same fields as contributors, plus the service term the grant was priced against

Three real launches, three different answers

It is common to see a claimed "standard" token allocation online. There is not one. The clearest way to see that is to read what three widely-studied projects actually published at launch. All three figures below come from the projects themselves, not from a data aggregator.

Published genesis allocations, as stated by each project
Bucket	Uniswap (UNI)	Optimism (OP)	Arbitrum (ARB)
Core contributors / team	21.266%	19%	26.94% (with advisors)
Investors	18.044%	17%	17.53%
Advisors	0.69%	Not stated separately	Included in team line
Community / treasury / ecosystem	60.00% total to community, of which 43% to the governance treasury	25% ecosystem fund plus 20% retroactive public goods funding	35.28% DAO treasury plus 7.5% foundation
User distribution	15% claimable at launch by historical users and liquidity providers	19% user airdrops	11.62% user airdrop plus 1.13% to DAOs
Genesis supply	1,000,000,000 UNI	4,294,967,296 OP	10,000,000,000 ARB
Stated lock-up	Four-year vesting on team, investor, and advisor allocations	Lock-up stated for core contributor and investor allocations	Four-year lock-up, first unlock one year after TGE, then monthly

Figures as published by Uniswap Labs, the Optimism community documentation, and the Arbitrum Foundation documentation, accessed 11 August 2026. Reproduced to illustrate the variation between launches — not as a benchmark or a recommendation.

Read across the rows and the point becomes obvious. Investor allocations sat close together at roughly 17% to 18%, but the contributor line ranged from 19% to nearly 27%, and the three projects split the remainder along completely different philosophical lines. Arbitrum put over a third of supply into a DAO treasury; Optimism carved out a fifth specifically for retroactive public goods funding; Uniswap made its largest single move a claimable distribution to prior users. Copying any one of these because it is "what people do" imports a governance philosophy you may not hold.

Why spreadsheets fail faster here than with equity

A company cap table in a spreadsheet is a bad idea that survives for years, because equity events are rare and slow. A financing closes; someone updates the sheet in the following week; nothing moves in between. Token cap tables do not have that grace period. Unlocks tick continuously, often per second in a vesting contract. Balances move on a public chain without your involvement. Aggregators publish supply figures derived from your schedule whether or not you gave them one.

Continuous accrual. A four-year linear unlock changes the correct number every block, so any figure in a static sheet is stale the moment it is typed.
Two sources of truth. The vesting contract is authoritative for what has unlocked; your records are authoritative for who is entitled. Nothing forces them to agree, and nothing alerts you when they stop agreeing.
Public consequences. Circulating supply and fully diluted valuation are computed from your schedule. An error is not internal — it shows up on price pages and in coverage.
Irreversible transfers. A mistaken equity issuance is corrected by a board consent. A mistaken token transfer to the wrong address is usually permanent.
Multi-chain sprawl. Supply bridged across networks means the same allocation is represented by several contracts, and naive addition double-counts it.
Departure does not stop the clock. Unlock contracts frequently keep releasing to a departed contributor unless someone actively intervenes, which is the opposite of how equity vesting behaves.

Keeping the register honest

A reconciliation loop that catches drift early

This is a records-hygiene procedure, not legal or accounting advice. The specific controls a project needs depend on its structure and its auditors.

Fix the denominator
Write down genesis supply, the emission or burn rules, and every contract address that can mint. Everything else is computed from this, so it has to be unambiguous before anything downstream is trustworthy.
Record entitlements at the instrument level
Each investor row should point at the SAFT, token warrant, or side letter it came from, with its conversion mechanics attached. Each contributor row should point at the grant document and its leaver terms.
Model the unlock curve, not the unlock date
Store cliff, start, duration, and release frequency as parameters and compute the schedule. A hardcoded list of dates and amounts cannot be re-derived when a term is amended.
The token vesting calculator does this arithmetic for a single schedule if you want to sanity-check a model.
Reconcile against the chain
Compare what your model says should have unlocked against what the vesting contracts have actually released, and compare treasury balances against the addresses you believe you control. Investigate every difference.
Publish a supply definition and stick to it
State exactly what you count as circulating, including how you treat market-maker loans, unclaimed airdrops, bridged supply, and treasury holdings. Aggregators will publish a number regardless; publishing yours first makes the disagreement legible.

One more structural point, because it is the one most often missed. A token cap table is rarely the only cap table a token project runs. There is usually a company underneath — a corporation with stockholders, option holders, and a board — and a separate entity that issued the token. The two registers describe overlapping but non-identical groups of people, and reconciling them is a harder problem than either one alone. That is the subject of the dual cap table guide at /equity/dual-cap-table.

Frequently asked questions

Is a token cap table legally required?

No statute requires one in the way corporate law requires a stock ledger. Projects keep one because investors, auditors, tax advisers, and exchanges all ask for the same information, and because reconstructing it after the fact from chain data is difficult and error-prone.

How is a token cap table different from an equity cap table?

It groups holders into allocation buckets rather than share classes, tracks unlocks rather than vesting with forfeiture, has no par value or preference stack, and sits alongside a public ledger where balances move without the issuer approving the transfer.

Can you actually know who holds your token?

Not completely. You can see balances by address, and you know who you distributed to. You cannot generally see who controls an address after the tokens move, and exchange-held tokens sit in omnibus wallets. A token cap table tracks entitlements and distributions, not beneficial ownership of the float.

What is the standard token allocation split?

There is not one. Three of the most-studied launches allocated 19%, 21.266%, and 26.94% to contributors and split the remainder in structurally different ways. Ranges observed in public launches are useful context, not a template.

Do tokens dilute equity holders?

Not directly, because they are not shares in the company. But a token issued by a related entity can move economic value away from the company that the equity holders own, which is why token warrants and side letters exist and why the two registers have to be read together.

When should a project stop using a spreadsheet?

Practically, once unlocks are live and more than one entity is distributing. At that point the correct figure changes continuously and lives in two places at once, which is precisely the condition a spreadsheet handles worst.

Sources

Introducing UNI — genesis allocation and vesting — Uniswap LabsChecked 11 Aug 2026
OP token overview — supply and initial allocation — Optimism community documentationChecked 11 Aug 2026
ARB airdrop eligibility and distribution specifications — Arbitrum FoundationChecked 11 Aug 2026
Delaware General Corporation Law § 219 — stock ledger — Delaware CodeChecked 11 Aug 2026
Supply: circulating, total, and max — CoinMarketCapChecked 11 Aug 2026

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Published: 11 Aug 2026

Glide · Equity