Crypto's unlock calendar is heavy this week. Roughly $1.11 billion in tokens is scheduled to hit the market in early October 2026, led by Hyperliquid's HYPE unlock on October 6 — 3.75 million tokens worth about $340 million, or 1.69% of released supply. That single tranche is going to one institutional buyer, according to the unlock data.
Ethena's ENA unlock lands a day earlier, on October 5: 171.88 million tokens worth $41.52 million, or 1.88% of released supply. Aptos follows on October 11 with 11.31 million APT worth $9.06 million. Aerodrome Finance, Movement and Babylon round out the week.
Hyperliquid's single-buyer tranche
Most unlocks trickle out to a spread of insiders and early backers. Hyperliquid's doesn't. The 3.75 million HYPE going to a single institutional buyer on October 6 is the largest single line item on the calendar, and it's the one worth watching. Hyperliquid runs a decentralized perpetual futures exchange on its own Layer-1 chain, with on-chain order books and sub-second finality — a design that's kept HYPE in the conversation all year.
Released supply sits at 474.83 million HYPE against a 1 billion total. That leaves a lot of tokens still to come, and each unlock is a reminder of how much of the float hasn't shown up yet. Whether one buyer absorbs it quietly or moves it onto the market is the question nobody has publicly answered.
Ethena pays contributors and investors
Ethena's unlock is the more conventional kind. The 171.88 million ENA — worth $41.52 million — splits into 93.75 million for core contributors and 78.13 million for investors. Ethena's released supply is 9.15 billion ENA, out of 15 billion total, and the project's flagship product is USDe, a synthetic dollar stablecoin on Ethereum, with ENA as its governance token.
Contributor unlocks tend to get watched closely because they're the tranche most likely to be sold. Investors can wait; people who've been working on the protocol often can't. That's not a prediction about what happens this week — it's just the pattern the market has learned to price in.
Aptos spreads it wider
Aptos is the smallest of the three named unlocks: 11.31 million APT on October 11, worth $9.06 million, or 0.64% of released supply. The allocations are more spread out than Ethena's — 3.96 million to core contributors, 3.21 million to the community, 2.81 million to investors, and 1.33 million to the foundation.
Aptos is a Layer-1 built for dApps and Web3 using the Move programming language, and it's been on the receiving end of a steady schedule of unlocks since its released supply crossed 1.76 billion APT against a total of 2.55 billion. The 0.64% figure is small enough that it's unlikely to move the tape much on its own.
The rest of the week
Aerodrome Finance, Movement and Babylon are also on the calendar, though the data doesn't break out their individual tranches. Taken together with HYPE, ENA and APT, the week's total comes to $1.11 billion — a number that matters less for what it does to prices on any given day than for what it says about the supply still waiting in the queue.
October 6 is the date to circle. Hyperliquid's institutional buyer either takes delivery and holds, or doesn't. Ethena's contributor allocation and Aptos's foundation tranche land on either side of it. By the end of next week, the market will have a clearer read on who's selling and who's sitting still.
