Ritual mainnet unlocks 18% and locks insiders out of stake

Ritual public mainnet is live, and the stakeable float is narrower than the launch rhetoric. The Ritual Foundation tokenomics page sets initial supply at 10 billion RITUAL and unlocks 1.8 billion tokens, 18% of that supply, at Ritual Public Mainnet. The page states that locked tokens cannot be staked, and that staking rewards flow only to unlocked, circulating supply. The token unlock is what decides who can secure Ritual in the first year.

The 18% is three named lines. Ecosystem Growth and research and development releases 12.5% for liquidity and network operations. The foundation treasury releases 5%, half of its 10% allocation. A further 0.5%, 50 million RITUAL, is the airdrop, fully unlocked from day one. Five lines sit on an explicit one-year lock: core contributors at 29%, labs investors at 11.3%, the labs treasury at 5%, the foundation private sale at 1% and frontier AI grants at 4.7%. Those lines sum to 51% of initial supply, so staking rewards in the first year attach to a minority of the cap table. Issuance starts at about 5% annualised and is paid to validators, AI executors and their delegators.

The foundation dated its mainnet post 26 October 2026, and its X account said that afternoon that mainnet and RITUAL were live. Validators stake RITUAL to produce and verify blocks, and any holder can delegate unlocked RITUAL rather than run one. On Ethereum, staking share is already how desks read a security budget. A treasury staking inventory it still holds, as in a vehicle staking to its own validator, is the pattern kept from insider wallets for at least a year. A custodian adding staking, as BNY Mellon has done inside custody, would find eligible Ritual stake only in tokens already released.

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Insider tokens stay locked for a minimum of one year from mainnet launch, and the last tokens unlock four years later. After year one, core contributor grants run from a 50% release with the rest monthly through month 24 to a 33% release with the rest monthly through month 36. Labs investors release 50% at one year, then monthly through month 24. After the first year the private sale unlocks in a straight line through year two, and frontier grants unlock monthly through month 24. The labs treasury shares the one-year lock. The remaining 12.5% of the ecosystem line unlocks monthly over four years. Network participation keeps 13.5% of supply locked for 15 months, then releases it monthly through month 48. The foundation's other 5% unlocks over four years.

The airdrop goes to Infernet operators weighted by uptime and workloads, to Frenrug users and to long-standing community members, after Sybil clusters were removed. The launch thread points to a claim page, while the tokenomics page still says further claim details will follow. Locked tokens carry no vote until they unlock. For the first six months the foundation and core developers make protocol decisions. An upgrade takes effect when validators choose to run the new software. Signals from month six are non-binding, and votes bind from month 12, a timetable the page calls a target rather than a deadline. If 26 October 2026 is the lock's start, the first insider release and binding votes land together a year later.

AI executors run inference and HTTP calls inside trusted execution environments and are paid from a prepaid RITUAL balance. The tokenomics page admits them at launch through attestation and an approved list. Developer documentation calls participation open to reference-hardware operators and also says genesis carries an executor whitelist, so admission should be read from the registry. RITUAL is an 18-decimal native asset of the Ritual chain, chain ID 784. Tokens bridged to BNB Smart Chain and Base through LayerZero are locked on the Ritual chain, so they do not add to total supply. Coinbase's Ritual page says the token is available on its centralised exchange, which the foundation's thread called the first listing. The page shows 1.8 billion circulating, matching the unlock, and a 10 billion maximum, while the tokenomics page lists maximum supply as uncapped because issuance continues and the EIP-1559 base fee is burned. For the coming year, staking and the later binding vote sit with wallets already released.

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