Circulating, Total and Max Supply: Crypto Supply Explained

Every coin page on Leveraged Weekly lists a circulating supply and, where one exists, a maximum supply. These numbers look dry, but they determine market cap, shape future selling pressure and explain why two coins with similar prices can have wildly different values.

Circulating supply

Circulating supply is the number of coins that are publicly available and trading right now. It excludes coins that are locked in vesting contracts, held in reserve by a foundation or otherwise not yet released. Circulating supply is the figure used to calculate market capitalization.

Measuring it is harder than it sounds. Data providers rely on project disclosures and on-chain analysis to decide which wallets count as circulating, so figures can differ slightly between sources.

Total supply

Total supply is every coin that currently exists, including locked and reserved coins, minus any that have been permanently destroyed, or “burned.” The gap between total and circulating supply is the amount that could still enter the market.

Maximum supply

Maximum supply is the hard limit on how many coins can ever exist. Bitcoin is the best-known example: its protocol caps supply at 21 million coins. New bitcoin are issued as rewards to miners, and that reward is cut in half roughly every four years in an event known as the halving, so issuance slows over time and gradually approaches the cap.

Many coins have no maximum supply at all. Ethereum has no fixed cap; instead, since an upgrade in 2021, part of every transaction fee is burned, which offsets some or all of the new issuance depending on how busy the network is. When CoinGecko lists no maximum supply for a coin, our coin pages say so rather than guessing.

A worked example

Consider a hypothetical token with a maximum supply of 1 billion. Today 250 million are circulating, 600 million exist in total once locked allocations are counted, and the remaining 400 million will be created as rewards in future years.

Only a quarter of the eventual supply is trading. If the price stayed flat while circulating supply quadrupled, market cap would quadruple too — but each existing holder would own a much smaller share of the whole. That dilution is why a coin’s supply schedule matters as much as its current price.

Unlocks, burns and inflation

• Token unlocks release previously locked coins — often allocations to founders and early investors — into circulation on a set schedule. Large unlocks can add selling pressure if the recipients choose to sell.
• Burns permanently remove coins and reduce total supply. Some networks burn a share of transaction fees; some projects run periodic buy-and-burn programs.
• Inflation is the rate at which new coins are created, usually expressed per year. With 5% annual inflation, a holder who does nothing sees their share of total supply shrink by roughly that much each year, unless they receive some of the new coins, for example through staking rewards.

Reading supply on Leveraged Weekly

On each coin page, the market snapshot states how much of the maximum supply is already circulating. A coin with 95% of its supply in circulation has little dilution left; one with 20% has most of its supply ahead of it. Compare that figure with the gap between market cap and fully diluted valuation described in our market cap guide.