LayerZero’s next lock-up expires on October 20, and it is larger than the unlock calendars suggest: around 23.63 million ZRO become tradable, equal to 5.92 percent of the circulating supply. Both allocations go to insiders, none to users. Measured against daily trading volume, however, the tranche amounts to only about half a trading day, and the decision facing you as a holder sits between those two numbers.
This article works the date out for you: how big the tranche really is relative to the market, who receives the tokens, what the LayerZero Foundation’s buybacks put up against it, and which German tax deadline also weighs on the decision if you want to sell before the date.
What leaves the LayerZero lock-up on October 20
LayerZero is a protocol for transmitting messages and value between different blockchains; ZRO is its token. Total supply is capped at one billion ZRO, and a large share of that sits in allocations that become tradable only step by step.
Lock-up (vesting): An allocation that belongs to its recipient but is contractually not yet transferable. At LayerZero this runs in monthly instalments, and each instalment makes a further block of tokens tradable.
For October 20 the unlock calendars list around 23.63 million ZRO; a scheduling report dated October 6 gives the same amount and the same split. Provider figures diverge slightly: depending on the data basis they range between 23.08 million and 23.63 million ZRO, and none of these providers is the official source. What holds up is the date and the mechanics of the release, not the third digit of the amount. The calculations in this article therefore take the upper figure, because it does not make the selling pressure look smaller than it is.
5.92 percent of the circulating supply: why unlock calendars often show too low a figure
Most unlock calendars show a percentage next to each tranche. That percentage is only as good as the number it is divided by, and the errors start exactly there. If a calendar divides the tranche by the total amount already unlocked, or by an outdated figure, the result is a markedly smaller percentage.
As of October 10 the circulating supply stands at 399.2 million ZRO out of one billion in total. For a tranche of 23.63 million ZRO that works out to a share of 5.92 percent. Divide instead by 654 million, a number that appears in scheduling overviews of this event but is not the circulating supply, and you land at 3.61 percent, understating the figure by almost two thirds.
Three supply concepts are regularly confused here, and they deliver three different results: the circulating supply (tradable, and therefore the correct denominator), the unlocked supply (no longer locked, but in part not yet on the market) and the total supply (one billion here, the denominator for fully diluted valuation). How to set this calculation up yourself for any token is covered at length in our guide to ZRO’s monthly dilution from August 2026, which also explains the difference between cliff and linear vesting.
Core contributors and strategic partners: who receives the 23.63 million ZRO
According to the unlock overviews, the October tranche splits into two items: around 10.63 million ZRO to core contributors, meaning the core team and the protocol’s contributors, and 13 million ZRO to strategic partners, meaning backers and partners from the early funding rounds. No share for users, from an airdrop or distribution programme, is listed for this date.
That split is the real difference from unlocks where a large part goes to many small recipients. Backers and teams hold large single positions, have an entry price far below today’s level and answer to deadlines of their own towards their investors. Whether they sell cannot be read off the date, but the option of selling in a single block is greater with two recipient groups than with ten thousand wallets.
The price adds context. At $2.02, ZRO trades around 73 percent below its all-time high of $7.47, yet it has gained roughly 92 percent over thirty days and about 15 percent over seven. The recipients of this tranche are therefore looking at a vigorous recovery rather than a trough, the sort of setting in which profit-taking becomes more rather than less likely.
Measured against daily trading volume, the tranche equals half a trading day
A percentage of the circulating supply tells you how much new supply can appear. It does not tell you whether the market absorbs that supply. For that you need a second yardstick, and it is trading volume.
At $2.02, the tranche is worth roughly $47.7 million, or about €42.5 million. ZRO’s daily trading volume runs between $89 million and $103 million depending on the data source. The tranche therefore equals 0.46 to 0.53 daily volumes, or about half a trading day. Even if every recipient sold everything immediately, the amount would be a volume the market turns over in half a day anyway.
This yardstick separates harmless dates from heavy ones better than any percentage. An unlock worth two percent of the circulating supply can weigh ten daily volumes on a thinly traded token and depress the price for weeks. An unlock worth six percent on a liquid token is worked through in two sessions. ZRO belongs in the second category: large percentage, small weight on the market. If you want to assess such dates regularly, it helps to look at the volume profile of the venues where the token is liquid at all. Our crypto exchange comparison shows which venues offer depth for tokens like this and which merely quote a price.
The LayerZero Foundation’s buybacks cover one tenth of a single monthly tranche
A buyback programme runs against the unlocks. The LayerZero Foundation buys ZRO back on the market and funds this out of ecosystem revenue; its own overview lists the purchases month by month. These figures are the cleanest counterweight to the unlock calendar, because they come from the entity doing the buying.
The position after thirteen reported months, from September 2025 to September 2026: 2,537,790 ZRO bought back, for $3,680,825. That comes to 0.25 percent of total supply. The figures are published openly in the LayerZero Foundation’s buyback overview.
Now the comparison that appears in no unlock calendar: all buybacks from thirteen months together equal barely eleven percent of a single monthly tranche. The strongest buyback month on record, November 2025 with 346,020 ZRO for $514,058, covers 1.5 percent of the October unlock. The most recent reported month, September 2026 with 162,433 ZRO for $351,543, covers 0.7 percent.
The buyback programme is therefore not a counterweight to the unlock but a signal: it shows that revenue accrues in the ecosystem and flows back into the token. As a buffer against 23.63 million newly tradable tokens, at this order of magnitude it does not serve. Anyone arguing from the buyback has to state that ratio alongside it.
One qualification belongs with this. The overview reports months up to September 2026. No line exists for October yet, and how much is bought in the current month depends on the month’s revenue. The foundation lists Stargate as its only active revenue source, the bridge whose overhaul we described in August when LayerZero shut down fifteen chains.
The fee switch has been voted down four times, and that keeps the buyback small
One lever could enlarge the buybacks considerably, and it has never been pulled. The fee switch is a vote on whether the protocol charges a fee for every message it transmits. Were that fee to accrue, it would, by the foundation’s own description, be swapped into ZRO and burned, permanently shrinking the supply.
The LayerZero Foundation’s governance page lists four completed votes on this, each in December and June: December 2024, June 2025, December 2025 and most recently June 2026. All four ended with the same result, namely no fee. The protocol lever therefore remains off, and the buybacks stay tied to the revenue of individual applications.
For holders this means a structural counter-effect to the monthly unlocks exists on paper but has failed to win a majority four times over. Betting on that effect means betting on a vote whose outcome has repeated itself four times. No announcement of a next round appears on the page.
An unlock is not yet a sell order
The most common fallacy around unlock dates is to infer selling pressure directly from the unlocked amount. Unlocked means transferable. It does not mean that the recipient sells, nor that he sells immediately, and least of all that he sells at the price on the day.
In practice large recipients spread sales over weeks, sell over the counter to individual buyers, or hedge via futures long before the tokens become tradable. That second option explains why price pressure around large tranches often appears before the date rather than on it: anyone who wants to hedge does so while the price still holds. Watch the days ahead of October 20 as well, and, if you follow the derivatives market, the funding rates of perpetual contracts, which you can read off the venues in our perp DEX comparison.
Which ZRO tranches still follow after October 20
October 20 is not a one-off event but one instalment in a series. The allocations to the core team and to backers continue in monthly instalments after an initial lock, and the unlock calendars list further tranches running into 2027. The order of magnitude per month stays similar, because the instalments come out of the same allocation.
That leads to a sober expectation: every month adds a block of supply the size of half a trading day, for as long as the series runs. No catastrophe and no reason to panic, but a permanent headwind that any price expectation has to price in. Conversely the headwind shrinks as volume grows: double the daily volume and the same tranche weighs half as much.
Selling before the date: the one-year holding period under German tax law
For investors in Germany, a decision before the unlock date has a second side that has nothing to do with the price. Gains from selling crypto assets are private disposals under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act (EStG). Sell within one year of buying and the gain is taxable at your personal income tax rate. If the purchase is more than a year old, the gain remains tax-free.
This period runs per acquisition, not per token, and it is set by your purchase date, not by LayerZero’s unlock date. In concrete terms: anyone who bought ZRO only during the recovery of recent weeks is in taxable territory when selling before October 20, and with a price gain of around 92 percent over thirty days the tax can exceed the difference between two selling dates. A tax-free allowance applies to small gains; once it is exceeded, the entire gain is taxable. Which amounts and deadlines apply in your case depends on your tax return, and for documenting purchase data a tool from our crypto tax software comparison is worth having.
Anyone who swapped STG for ZRO holds precisely this token
One group of readers is directly affected by this date without ever having bought ZRO: everyone who swapped their STG for ZRO in the course of the Stargate and LayerZero merger. Whoever did so holds, today, the token whose insider tranche unlocks on October 20. The deadlines, the fixed exchange rate and the terms of that swap are set out in swapping STG for ZRO.
For this group the tax position deserves particular scrutiny, because the swap itself can count as a disposal and thus start a new period. The purchase date that counts for Section 23 may then not be the original STG purchase but the moment of the swap.
Our assessment: the percentage frightens more than the market does
In the newsroom’s view, the October tranche is the case where a large headline number conceals a small market effect. The evidence sits above: 5.92 percent of the circulating supply sounds heavy, yet it equals 0.46 to 0.53 daily volumes, and even a complete sell-off would be executed within half a trading day. We name what argues against it just as plainly. The tranche goes exclusively to two insider groups holding large single positions, the price stands, after roughly 92 percent in thirty days, in a zone where profit-taking suggests itself, and the buyback programme, at barely eleven percent of one monthly tranche out of thirteen months, puts up no counterweight. The structural lever that could change this has been voted down four times.
Our conclusion is therefore not a statement about the price but about method: sorting unlock dates by percentage of circulating supply sorts them wrongly. The yardstick is the ratio to daily trading volume. By that yardstick, October 20 at ZRO is a mid-sized date in a long series. Total loss is possible with any crypto asset, and an unlock can amplify a downward move in a weak market that began for other reasons.
ZRO unlock: 23.6 million tokens against 2.5 million in buybacks
The numbers for the date are in, and on both sides they point the same way: plenty of new supply, little counterweight, but a market that turns the volume over in half a day. Three steps that turn this into a decision of your own:
- Work out your own yardstick. Divide the tranche in dollars by daily trading volume, not by the circulating supply. Below one daily volume a date is manageable; above five it becomes a problem. Tools for volume and schedule overviews are listed in our comparison of crypto analytics platforms.
- Check your purchase date before you check the price. If your acquisition is less than a year old, selling costs tax on the gain. Keep purchase dates and amounts documented without gaps, most easily with one of the crypto tax tools.
- Decide on custody, not only on selling. If you intend to hold through the unlock series, there is no need to leave the tokens sitting on an exchange. Which devices are suitable is shown in our hardware wallet comparison.
(As of October 10, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
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