ADI token unlock, 9 December 2026: ADI Chain insiders’ 12-month cliff ends

On 9 December 2026, one year to the day after the ADI token went live, the 12-month cliff on ADI Chain’s team, partner and private investor tokens ends. Those three groups hold 32% of the 999,999,999 ADI genesis supply. From that date their share starts to vest month by month, according to the ADI Foundation’s tokenomics documentation. Two trackers put this ADI token unlock at about 11.4 million ADI, a little over 1.1% of supply.

The schedule gives no hour. Releases fall “on the 9th of each month”, so we list the event as all day in UTC. Abu Dhabi is four hours ahead.

ADI token unlock on 9 December: about 11.4 million ADI

tokenomics.com lists about 11.4 million ADI for 9 December, worth USD 91.8 million at the price it used when we read the page at 09:45 UTC on 7 November. DropsTab gives 11.38 million ADI (1.14% of supply), about USD 91.3 million at the same reading. Both figures are tracker estimates built from the project’s schedule, not an amount published by the foundation.

tokenomics.com splits the tranche four ways: community 54%, foundation 19%, private investors 15% and “insiders” 12%. It does not say where it puts the partnership allocation.

The foundation’s own table lets anyone redo the sum. Take the community fund after its launch block (35% of supply, less 1.37%) over 72 months: about 4.79 million ADI a month. Add the treasury after its 5% launch block over 108 months, about 2.20 million. That gives 6.99 million, which is the November tranche. From December, the 320 million or so ADI of the team, partners and investors adds about 4.44 million a month over 72 months, for a total near 11.4 million. This is our arithmetic, on the assumption of equal monthly steps, which the document does not spell out after year one.

One worry for holders of locked tokens is a lump sum at the cliff. The documentation rules it out: its “% Bullet at Cliff” column reads 0% for the team, the private investors and the partnerships.

The ADI vesting terms in the project’s documentation

The tokenomics page lists seven allocations. At the token generation event, 5.865% of supply (58,647,260 ADI) was in circulation: all of the liquidity pool, a quarter of the incentive tokens and small slices of the treasury and community fund.

Under these terms the 32% does not reach the market at once. Spread over 72 months after the cliff, the team, partner and investor tokens keep vesting until late 2032. The treasury runs on a nine-year schedule.

ADI Chain: an Abu Dhabi layer 2 for stablecoins and tokenised assets

The ADI Foundation was set up by Sirius International Holding, the technology arm of Abu Dhabi’s International Holding Company (IHC). ADI Chain is an Ethereum layer 2 that posts validity proofs to Ethereum and was billed at launch as the first public chain built on ZKsync’s Airbender stack. ADI pays the fees. The foundation’s website aims to bring one billion people onto blockchain by 2030, starting with the Middle East, Asia and Africa, and claims more than 8,000 transactions per second, finality in about two seconds and fees near one cent. Those are the project’s own figures.

Mainnet and the token went live on 9 December 2025, with listings on Kraken, Crypto.com and KuCoin, according to the launch press release, a sponsored text. A dirham stablecoin, DDSC, followed on 12 February 2026. IHC and First Abu Dhabi Bank started it, the bank holds the reserves in custody, and each token is backed one to one by dirhams. The release says the UAE Central Bank approved and licensed it. Our guide to stablecoins as dollar access in emerging markets covers how such tokens are used.

9 November, a smaller tranche without insiders

First comes a smaller step. About 7.0 million ADI (6,992,616 according to tokenomics.com), or 0.7% of total supply, is due on 9 November, all of it for the community fund and the foundation. DropsTab shows the same 6.99 million ADI, worth about USD 56.1 million on 7 November. December adds the first insider tokens on top of that monthly flow.

Why the share of market cap means little here

The trackers disagree on how many ADI tokens circulate by roughly tenfold. tokenomics.com counts about 97.4 million ADI in the market; DropsTab shows about 9.43 million. The 58.6 million in circulation at launch, per the foundation, sits closer to the higher figure, but we could not reconcile the two.

The gap changes everything that depends on it. tokenomics.com puts the December tranche at 6.6% of market capitalisation. DropsTab, with its smaller float, puts the same tokens at about 120% of it. We give the share of total supply only.

For scale, DropsTab showed ADI near USD 8.02 at 09:45 UTC on 7 November, with about USD 5.2 million traded over 24 hours. KuCoin’s ADI/USDT pair took about USD 4.3 million of that, followed by a Uniswap v3 pool; Crypto.com Exchange and Kraken each saw less than USD 35,000. One day of trading, then, was well under a tenth of the December tranche at that price. That is a single snapshot, not a forecast.

What Abu Dhabi regulates, and what it does not

The DDSC press release says the ADI Foundation is a not-for-profit DLT foundation registered with Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) and governed by ADGM’s DLT Foundation Regulation of 2023. It adds that ADI Chain and the tokens ADI develops are not subject to registration with the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA), ADGM’s financial regulator, and describes ADI as a utility token. The central bank licence covers DDSC, not ADI, and the foundation’s website names no licence for the token. Dubai has its own regime, as our report on Bybit’s Dubai spot licence shows.

What is still unknown before 9 December

No source gives the hour of the release. The recipients behind the “insiders” and “private investors” lines are not named, and nothing public says whether they will move tokens to exchanges or hold them.

The date falls during Abu Dhabi Finance Week (7 to 10 December), a coincidence of calendar. For newcomers, our glossary explains what a token unlock is. tokenomics.com counts 109 ADI release dates in all, 98 of them still to come, the last on 9 December 2034.