Kite AI token unlock around 3 November 2026: 800M KITE for the team and investors, on a date Kite has not published

The one-year lock on the Kite AI token held by its team and investors ends around 3 November 2026. That day is our calculation, not Kite’s. Kite’s MiCA white paper says both groups are “subject to a 1-year cliff with a 4 year unlock” and gives no calendar date, so we added twelve months to 3 November 2025, the day KITE started trading on Binance. Two trackers, DropsTab and CryptoTicker, put the cliff tranche at 800 million KITE, 8% of the 10 billion supply: 500 million for the team and 300 million for investors. Kite has not published those amounts either.

Tokenomist priced KITE at $0.120 on its page last updated at 08:21 UTC on 23 October 2026. At that price the 800 million KITE come to about $96 million, roughly a third (33.5%) of the 2,391,196,012 KITE that Tokenomist counts as unlocked. It is a value at one moment, not a forecast.

Kite AI token unlock date: 3 November is derived, not published

Kite AI Ltd published its MiCA white paper on 14 November 2025. It states the cliff as a length of time and never ties it to a day. It does not even fix a launch date: the token launch, it says, was “expected to be November 2025”. Kite’s tokenomics documentation says less still, with “structured vesting schedules” for investors and “multi-year vesting schedules” for the team, and no cliff at all.

Our date rests on the first trade. Binance’s Launchpool announcement, as reproduced by CoinCarp, listed KITE at 13:00 UTC on 3 November 2025 with KITE/USDT, KITE/USDC, KITE/BNB and KITE/TRY pairs, and CryptoTicker cites an HTX listing of KITE/USDT the same day. Count one year from there and the cliff ends on 3 November 2026. The calculation assumes Kite’s clock started with trading. Kite has never said what it started with.

That assumption could be off by days. Launchpool farming opened at 00:00 UTC on 1 November 2025, so tokens existed before they traded, and CoinMarketCap’s unlock database marks 1 November 2026, according to CryptoTicker. Counting from the white paper’s “starting date of admission to trading”, 17 November 2025, gives 17 November 2026, although KITE had been trading for two weeks by then and that date is a MiCA formality.

Two trackers read on 23 October point to 3 November. Tokenomist shows its next Kite unlock on 3 November 2026, labelled as an Ecosystem and Community release with no amount. DropsTab shows the team and investor tranches due in 11 days, which also lands on 3 November. No source gives an hour, so this page lists the whole UTC day.

KITE tokenomics: what sits behind the cliff

Supply is capped at 10 billion KITE. Kite’s documentation and Tokenomist split it the same way, and the white paper adds the release rules (our glossary explains tokenomics for newcomers):

Team and investors together hold 3.2 billion KITE, almost a third of the supply, and none of it has been released since launch. What follows the cliff is less clear than the table suggests. The white paper does not say whether the four years run from launch or from the end of the cliff, or whether the release after it is linear. DropsTab models a cliff followed by 36 months of linear vesting for both groups. Tokenomist says the full schedule runs into 2030.

Even the launch float is disputed. The white paper says circulating supply at launch “will represent 27% of the total supply”. Binance’s announcement, in CoinCarp’s copy, gave 1.8 billion KITE, or 18%. We report both because we cannot reconcile them.

Why this page counts 800 million KITE, not 1.11 billion

The 800 million figure has a simple logic. 500 million is a quarter of the team’s 2 billion, and 300 million is a quarter of the investors’ 1.2 billion. That matches one reading of “a 1-year cliff with a 4 year unlock”: one year’s worth out of four released when the first year ends, the other three quarters spread over the next 36 months. It is the reading DropsTab uses. Kite has not confirmed it.

DropsTab, read on 23 October, lists 500 million KITE for the team (5% of supply) and 300 million for investors (3%). On the same page, 44.05 million KITE of modules and 65.22 million of ecosystem and community tokens fall due in 9 days, on 1 November. Those are routine linear releases, separate from the cliff.

CryptoTicker’s article of 17 October 2026, by Dennis Weidner, reaches 1.11 billion KITE, 11.1% of supply, for early November. It adds 200 million of community airdrop, 50 million for modules and about 60.4 million of ecosystem growth to the same 500 million and 300 million. It treats the airdrop and module amounts as cliff releases too, and the ecosystem slice as a running instalment. DropsTab has no 200 million airdrop row. So 1.11 billion is a tracker’s total across several allocations; 800 million is the part both trackers give to the team and investor cliff, and it is the figure in this page’s event data.

Share of circulating supply, with dates

Tokenomist’s page, last updated at 08:21 UTC on 23 October 2026, counted 2,391,196,012 KITE unlocked, 23.91% of supply, and showed a market capitalisation of $286.30 million and a fully diluted valuation of $1.20 billion, both at $0.120.

CryptoTicker, on 17 October, quoted two circulating figures: 2.391 billion KITE on CoinGecko and 2.568 billion on CoinMarketCap. Against them, the 800 million cliff tranche equals 33.5% or 31.2% of the float. CryptoTicker’s wider 1.11 billion would be 46.4% or 43.2%.

Unlocked does not mean sold. Team members and funds can keep the tokens, stake them or leave them with a custodian, and their individual terms are not public. Our glossary entry on the token unlock explains how a cliff differs from linear vesting.

What Kite is and who backed it

Kite builds a blockchain for payments made by AI agents. Its website, read on 23 October 2026, says “Kite Mainnet is live” and lists full EVM compatibility and native stablecoin settlement among the features of Kite Chain.

The company used to be called Zettablock. On 2 September 2025 PayPal’s newsroom announced an $18 million Series A led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst, which took Kite’s total funding to $33 million. The same release presented Kite AIR, short for Kite Agent Identity Resolution, with two parts: Agent Passport, an identity for an agent with limits on what it may do, and an Agent App Store where agents find and pay for APIs, data and commerce tools. Kite has not said which backers hold KITE, or how much each holds.

The token arrived two months after the round. Binance ran a two-day Launchpool from 1 November 2025, paying 150 million KITE (1.5% of supply) to users who locked BNB, FDUSD or USDC, then opened trading on 3 November with a Seed Tag on the token. The MiCA white paper followed on 14 November.

How it compares with Monad in November

Kite is not the only insider cliff this month. The Monad unlock on 24 November is estimated at 16.6 billion MON as its insider lock ends, a far larger slice of its float than Kite’s third. These are size comparisons, and they say nothing about prices.

For readers in Europe and the United States

Clocks change before the date: Europe returns to winter time on 25 October and the United States on 1 November. The UTC day of 3 November therefore runs from 01:00 on 3 November to 00:59 on 4 November in Paris and Rome, and from 19:00 on 2 November to 18:59 on 3 November in New York.

Kite filed a white paper under MiCA, with a notification date of 17 October 2025, and it is public on Kite’s site with its risk section. No EU authority approves such documents. We have not checked whether a licensed EU crypto-asset service provider lists KITE. Binance and HTX have listed it, but access depends on the platform and the country.

What is still unknown

The day and the hour, first: Kite has published neither, and trackers give 1, 3 or 17 November. The amounts are not official either. 500 million and 300 million KITE are DropsTab and CryptoTicker figures, and the quarter-of-four-years logic behind them is an inference. The white paper does not say when the four years start or what shape the release takes after the cliff.

Movements from team and investor wallets in early November, or a notice from Kite, would settle the date. This page will be updated if either appears.