Tokenomics 102: Digging Deeper on Supply

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?

Most protocols will allocate a decent chunk of their token emissions to lp rewards. If you provide liquidity for the protocol, you can stake that liquidity to earn a steady stream of tokens.

Max supply is fairly simple. What is the maximum potential supply of this token? For Bitcoin it’s 21,000,000. Ethereum doesn’t have one. For Crypto Raiders we set it at 100,000,000. For Yearn it’s 36,666.

Circulating Sup ply is where things get trickier. How many of a given token are circulating? For Bitcoin it’s easy, just subtract how many haven’t been released from the max supply and you have your number. Other L1s like Ethereum and Solana either self-report it or there are APIs available that monitor it.

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

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.

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

Supply is obviously just one piece of the puzzle though. So in future pieces of this series we’ll also dig deeper on demand, game theory, ROI, and other aspects to good tokenomics worth knowing before investing or launching a project of your own. 

If you see a big difference between the market cap and FDV, that means there are a lot of tokens locked up waiting to come on the market, and you should investigate how they’re going to enter the market (3 & 4) to see if you think the current price is justified.