Emission schedule

Emissions create supply. Vesting only moves it.

Two things get filed under one heading and they are not the same. Vesting governs tokens minted at genesis and held locked, so an unlock changes who holds them, not how many exist. Emissions mint tokens that did not exist before. Only one of the two moves total supply, and blurring them is how a deck ends up showing a flat supply line beside a staking reward the protocol has no minted tokens to pay.

The test is one sentence. If the schedule stopped tomorrow, would total supply keep rising? If yes, those are emissions. If no, that is a vesting calendar and the supply was already there. Run it on your own model before anyone else does.

Three shapes, and the terminal state is the argument

Fixed per block needs no explanation. Ethereum paid a flat block reward through its proof of work years, and changing it took a specification: EIP-649 set the reward to a base of 3 ETH at the Byzantium fork, down from the 5 ETH of the earlier era.² A fixed reward means the issuance rate as a share of supply falls every year on its own, because the numerator holds while the denominator grows.

Decaying is the Bitcoin shape. The subsidy started at 50 bitcoin per block and is halved every 210,000 blocks, roughly once every four years, and only blocks below height 6,930,000 are entitled to a subsidy at all.¹ The terminal state is zero, and everything after that has to be paid by transaction fees.

The third shape decays and then stops decaying. Dogecoin copied the halving mechanic, cutting the reward every 100,000 blocks, then replaced the tail of its schedule with a permanent 10,000 DOGE per block from block 600,000 onward.⁴ Issuance never ends, the supply has no cap, and the percentage rate falls toward zero without arriving. That is the design our tail emission entry covers.

A fourth behaves unlike any of them, because it is a control loop rather than a curve. The Cosmos SDK mint module recomputes an annual inflation rate every block against a goal bonded ratio, 67 percent on Cosmos Hub, pushing the rate up toward a ceiling when too little is staked and down toward a floor when too much is.³ Nobody can read that schedule off a chart in advance, which is a feature for the protocol and a problem for anyone modelling it.

What emissions are actually buying

Emissions buy three things in practice, and each has a different expiry. Security, meaning a subsidy paid to whoever does the expensive work of ordering blocks. Liquidity, meaning rewards paid to whoever parks capital so other people can trade against it. Growth, meaning rewards paid to whoever performs the behaviour the network needs more of, whether that is supplying storage, running hardware, or simply showing up.

Only the security budget has no natural end. A chain that stops paying for ordering stops being ordered. Liquidity and growth budgets are supposed to end, because they exist to bootstrap something meant to sustain itself. Across the designs we review, the failure is almost never the size of the number. It is that nobody wrote down what the budget was buying, so nobody can say when it has been bought.

Write each stream as a purchase order. This many tokens, over this period, for this measurable thing, and here is the condition under which we stop. A stream that cannot be stated that way is a transfer, not a budget, and it will run until someone notices.

Where the rule lives, and what changing it costs

An emission rule is a line of consensus code. Every node validates every block against it, and a block paying more than the rule allows is rejected by the network rather than flagged for review. That is what people mean when they call a schedule hard, and it is genuinely different from a promise in a whitepaper.

It is also changeable, and the interesting question is what a change costs. Ethereum's reduction to a 3 ETH base required a specification, client releases and a coordinated fork.² Cosmos Hub's inflation parameters move through an ordinary governance vote with no fork involved.³ Both are legitimate. They are not the same promise, and a founder who says immutable while shipping a governable parameter will get read on it.

So the disclosure that matters is not the curve. It is the amendment path: who can change this, through what process, and how quickly. Put that next to the chart.

The emissions nobody put in the schedule

A large share of what founders call emissions never touches consensus code. It is a treasury balance behind a multisig, spent on grants, market making, partnerships and campaigns. Mechanically that is distribution of tokens that already exist rather than new issuance, but the order book cannot tell the difference and does not try.

Two consequences follow. A supply chart drawn from protocol issuance alone understates what actually reaches exchanges. And discretionary spend has no schedule to point at, so it is the part of the plan most likely to accelerate exactly when the treasury is under pressure. We push clients to publish a capped discretionary budget alongside the emission curve, because the alternative is asking the market to trust a number that has not been written down yet.

What we settle before a schedule is written

Five answers, in this order. What each emission stream is buying, stated as a measurable outcome. What the terminal state is: zero, a floor, or a targeted rate. Who receives the emission and what they are structurally forced to do with it, because operators carrying fiat costs sell, and that is a supply-side fact rather than a sentiment. Where the rule lives and who can amend it. And what the discretionary spend is on top of the curve.

Answer those and the curve draws itself. Skip them and you have a chart that looks disciplined sitting above a budget nobody owns. The schedule is infrastructure for paying the network to grow. It is not a substitute for the business doing the growing.