Circulating supply is the count of tokens in the market and freely transferable right now, excluding locked, vesting, and treasury-held tokens. It is the denominator for market cap and grows with every unlock, so the gap to total supply is future dilution the market has not yet priced.
Launch-day circulating supply is the minimum, not the baseline. The float only grows, and the price has to keep pace with that growth just to hold market cap flat.
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How it works
Circulating supply counts only tokens that are freely transferable today. It leaves out vesting contracts, team lockups, foundation reserves, and any other restriction that blocks immediate transfer or sale. This is the number the market actually divides price into.
It is never static. Every cliff, every monthly linear vest tranche, every emission reward to stakers expands the count, which means dilution shows up as a rising denominator in the market cap formula.
Why it matters
The gap between circulating and total supply is the forward dilution schedule expressed as one number. A project with 100M circulating out of 1B total has 900M still in transit from vesting and emissions to the open market.
That pipeline lands on exchanges over the remaining vesting horizon whether or not the protocol is performing, because vesting schedules are usually contractual, not discretionary.
How we approach it
We model circulating supply month by month across the full vesting horizon, then overlay that schedule against planned demand catalysts.
Unlocks that land in a catalyst-free window are the single most reliable predictor of price suppression in post-TGE performance, so we surface those windows before they arrive rather than after.
See Token Allocation and Vesting for how this applies in practice.
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