the lock was "removed" for some. a day later, for everyone.

how a withdrawal actually works

read from the ticket objects, the pool object 0x06a49223… & a dry run. the move source isn't public, but the per-ticket timestamps make it unambiguous.

1. you call user_initiate_withdraw. the pool creates a UserWithdrawRequest ticket inside your position w time_of_request set & no unlock date yet.
2. the admin's settle_requests_manual runs weekly (sundays 14:00 utc, sometimes late). it accepts every pending ticket: stamps time_of_acceptance w the settle time & time_of_unlock w settle time plus the pool's locking_period, creates a batch entry keyed by the settle time holding the batch's ALPHA & redeems that much from the strategy. the lock is copied onto the ticket at this moment. later changes to locking_period don't touch it.
3. the keeper's process_withdraw_requests_manual moves one batch at a time into a shared claim pot (claimable_balance) & deletes the batch entry.
4. user_claim_withdraw checks your ticket's stamped time_of_unlock against the clock & pays you out of the pot. if the pot is short, you wait for the keeper.

so "the lock" is two things: a number on the pool (28 days) & a date stamped on your ticket at settle time. the tweet said the lock period "has been removed." the number on the pool was. the dates on the tickets weren't, cuz they can't be.

35 days vs 28, measured

alphafi.xyz/alpha↗ said (the docs still do) the lock period is "fixed at 35 days and enforced on-chain." the pool enforces 28 days from settlement. since the settle is weekly, a request waits 28 to 35 days depending on when in the week you made it. so 35 is the worst case, not the rule. i'd call that a rounding up.

the one ticket over 35 days (35.41) was requested jul 19 21:42 & the jul 26 settle ran late, on monday jul 27 at 07:27. settles i saw: aug 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 at 14:00, then sep 6 at 23:59, sep 16 at 01:34, sep 20 at 14:00. five of the 278, so you can see the shape:

my own ticket: requested sep 25 19:37:16 (unrelated, i was just done), accepted at the 22:30:59 settle w the lock already 0, unlock stamped 22:30:59, claimed 01:30:16 on sep 26. so i got lucky on timing & unlucky on price, which is roughly my whole crypto career.

what the 22:16:48 change did & didn't

the vault admin set locking_period from 2,419,200,000 ms to 0 (sYHn75Uh…). that did two things & not a third:

• it made the batch settled fourteen minutes later at 22:30:59 (26 receipts, 249,296 ALPHA, 86% of it a027's 214,001) claimable the moment it settled.
• it did the same for every request queued afterwards, including everyone who reacted to the tweet.
• it did nothing for the 51 tickets settled b/w aug 30 & sep 20 (86,672 ALPHA). those people unstaked by the rules in the four weeks before the shutdown & are locked in while the token went from ~$0.93 to ~$0.02.

all 51 were still pending at 01:55 utc on sep 27 & none had been claimed. the sep 16 batch is one ticket for 56,770 ALPHA plus smaller ones. that held for about a day: the sep 26 upgrade (see the note up top) let all of these claim ahead of their stamped dates & the queue was empty as of sep 30. the vault itself isn't: on oct 15 it still holds ~3.4M ALPHA across 1,228 positions, deposits paused, lock 0, so whoever is left can leave whenever.

the pot, step by step

claims were also bounded by what the pot held. pool state at each step, from past object versions on archive nodes.

before sep 25 the lock was 28 days at both versions i checked (1010815166 on sep 21, 1019927890 at 18:07 on sep 25). a request from sep 21 would normally have settled sunday sep 27 at 14:00 & been claimable oct 25 at 14:00. a59f's 11,566 fit in the pot from the start. a027's 214,001 could not have been claimed by anyone before 23:20:29 & was claimed at 23:21:04. anyone without a queued request still had to initiate & wait for a settle; after the tweet that took from under two minutes to five (idear: initiate 23:19:18, settle 23:20:10, claim 23:21:05).

the 22:30:59 batch

who had a request queued b/w sep 20 & the tweet, i.e. who got the "lock removed" treatment for real. split read from the settle event, at 2.06254 ALPHA per xtoken.

daily counts of new withdrawal requests: aug 17 to sep 14 mostly 1 to 3 a day (sep 15: 8). sep 21: 8. sep 22: 6. sep 23: 2. sep 24: 3. sep 25: 34. sep 26: 27 (partial). eight on sep 21, the day after the bailout & the day ALPHA jumped to $0.91, is two to four times normal. two of the eight were a027 & a59f. the wallet that queued at 22:21:16, 4.5 minutes after the lock change, is 6a49, a treasury payee. it never claimed. the one at 23:04:38, five minutes before the tweet, is 0x6d292ddc…d8af.

the penalty that wasn't (the first ALPHA vault, 2024 to 2025)

before the ember pool there was the original auto-compounding ALPHA vault, pool 0x6ee8f602…. i read every exit it ever paid: 194,635 txs, 54,371 withdrawals.

what the docs promised, from the tokenomics page on jul 5 2024↗ (day 9), still the same wording in oct 2025: "ALPHA tokens in this vault are locked for 100 days. You can withdraw locked tokens anytime with a 50% penalty." & for the team: "Team tokens have 300 day cliff... The team does not have access to these tokens while they are under the cliff and cannot earn a yield on them."

the contract did charge the penalty. on an early exit it split the position down the middle: half to you, half to alphafi's fee wallet 0xee5360c5…. 2,323 exits paid it, 9.94M ALPHA in all (2.49M of that is the fee wallet exiting its own deposits; ~30,000 other exits paid only a small fee). what happened next depended on who you were.

"handed back" means the fee wallet sent the exiter 90%+ of the exact penalty within ~15 minutes, usually 2 to 3. the first one was w3ce6's on aug 8 2024, day 43, still inside everyone else's 100-day lock. the last was oct 29 2025. of the team's 95 "kept" penalties, 17 were sent on to a different team wallet, same amount, within minutes (jan 18 2025: bdae charged 24,208.69, w3ce6 sent exactly 24,208.69 2m42s later; may 16 2025: bdae charged 9,270, w6a49 sent 9,270 26 seconds later). the rest sat in the fee wallet, which is theirs anyway.

all sizes, everyone outside that cluster: 774 wallets paid the penalty on 1,560 exits, 284,651 ALPHA, jul 1 2024 to nov 10 2025. most were small (1,127 exits under 100 ALPHA); 47 were over 1,000. none of the ones over 500 got it back.

the biggest two, the week alphalend's ALPHA market opened:

• may 8 2025, 18:31:17. bdae leaves the vault (4YH4L2rF…): 1,252,965.76 to it, 1,252,967.27 to the fee wallet. 18:34:21 the fee wallet sends 1,252,968 straight back (14Rvykqq…). 18:38:36 bdae posts all 2,505,933.76 as alphalend collateral (GzV4FcUg…), 47 seconds after the ALPHA market was created.
• may 9 2025, 09:16:52. a3fd leaves (DoWhhq35…): 625,922.88 to it, 625,925.66 to the fee wallet. 09:19:30 the fee wallet sends 625,923 back (BezjxZcJ…). by 09:28 a3fd has ~1.89M ALPHA in alphalend.

& the bag in that first exit got into the vault on day 29. on jul 25 2024 at 18:40:57 the distributor's withdraw_team_balance, signed by the keeper 0x5c455d27…, paid bdae 349,160.85 ALPHA (GWjBss6x…). three minutes later bdae put all of it into this vault (AYfFZZzx…), where it earned the vault's yield. the same withdraw-then-vault ran again on jul 26, 27, 28 & 29.

two days later the fee wallet sold. on jul 31 2024, 10:44:53 to 10:53:56, it swapped 66,300 ALPHA for 153,768 SUI in eight trades (~2.32 SUI each, the biggest 20,000 ALPHA for 46,335 SUI: 84BeLGjK…; the first, 10,000 for 23,273: 4fTa8sMY…). that was day 35. anyone who'd put ALPHA in this vault at launch was still 65 days from the end of their lock, or 50% short if they left. it's the only market swap the fee wallet made in the first 100 days. the rest of its selling went through cetus liquidity positions, which i read one by one from cetus's own add & remove events.

where that day's SUI went, minute by minute: 10:57:07, the fee wallet deposits 153,795 SUI (the sale, almost to the coin) into alphafi's own navi SUI vault (7AnCvQXV…). 11:08:22, it withdraws 76,500 SUI from that vault (6dMEsAvk…). 11:08:53, 31 seconds later, it sends 76,500 SUI to 0xb0615e45… (fUPRXiHt…). half the day-35 sale, out to that wallet 15 minutes after the last swap. 0xb0615e45 is the wallet that signed most of the jul 27 to 29 team-balance withdrawals above & had 16 of its own early-exit penalties handed back.

most were range orders: a narrow band holding only ALPHA, placed just above the price, so it turns into the other coin when the price walks through it, then gets closed. a limit sell, in other words. on the ALPHA/SUI pool, 66 of them sold 94,990 ALPHA for 210,709 SUI, almost all in july, into the climb to the 2.6 SUI top (e.g. 8,063.6 ALPHA opened jul 31 15:36, five hours after the swaps above, closed at 18:19 as 16,699 (16,665 liquidity + 34 fees) SUI: 8FR8QVJe… & 3HS5Tikn…). from aug 1 it switched to the ALPHA/USDC pool (wormhole USDC) & 109 range orders sold 166,408 ALPHA for 299,588 USDC by mid-october, the bands following the price down: ~$2.02 in early august, then $1.88, $1.73, $1.80 & $1.75 by half-month (e.g. 14,388 ALPHA opened sep 18 14:30, out as 26,668 USDC by 00:31: 5CTwV8EX…). positions that bought ALPHA back: 12, ~245 ALPHA. so in its first ~100 days the fee wallet sold ~327,700 ALPHA for ~364,500 SUI & ~299,600 USDC, steadily, while the vault's depositors were locked. (4 wide ALPHA/SUI positions that were never closed are left out; the counts are for closed ones.)