Tokenomics 102: Digging Deeper on Supply

Coingecko and other APIs will try to subtract out “inactive” tokens from the circulating supply, even if those tokens have been released to the market previously. 

On the surface this appears to be very community oriented, because anyone can buy the tokens, create liquidity, and stake it to earn more tokens. But depending on how it’s done, this could be a subtle way for the initial team or insiders to dramatically increase their share of the tokens.

You can get a decent amount of the information from public dashboards like Coingecko, but digging into the details in a project’s docs can help flush out some of these subtler details like how the emissions schedule is changing over time, who the tokens are going to, and what unlocks might be happening in the future.

So if a token has a price of $10, a circulating supply of 10,000,000, and a max supply of 100,000,000, then the Market Cap would be $100,000,000 and the FDV would be $1,000,000,000. 

The 35% of tokens allocated to the team and advisors are vested over 2 years, with a 6 month initial cliff. So 30% of tokens are initially unlocked, and then 35% come into the market over an 18 month period starting in month 6. So there’s approximately 2% of the supply hitting the market consistently per month for that period, then the inflation st... See more

Compare that to if only 10% of the tokens were initially released. Then the token supply would double in 5 months instead of 15! The early buyers would be much more impacted by the unlocks, and the token price would have a harder time keeping up with the new inflation. 

The market cap and the fully diluted valuation (FDV) are your two easy initial metrics for assessing the value of a cryptocurrency or token.

But it can quickly get complicated with project tokens. Here’s a simple example. For Crypto Raiders, we have released approximately 16,000,000 of our 100,000,000 total supply. But if you look on Coingecko, it says our circulating supply is only 6,723,611. Where are the rest?

The big recent example of this is LooksRare. As Cobie explained in his post on the topic, half of the farming rewards were available to early investors whose tokens were still locked. So while retail investors might have been under the impression that they were earning most of the fees of the platform, they were actually going to the early investor... See more