An emission schedule is the planned release of new tokens through rewards, incentives, and inflation, separate from the vesting of pre-allocated supply. Every emitted token is future sell pressure the design chooses to create, so we model the full horizon to match the heaviest emission year to demand that can absorb it.
Emissions that pay for activity generating real revenue create a flywheel. Emissions that pay for farming without underlying utility are a subsidy program with an expiration date.
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How it works
An emission schedule answers two questions: how many new tokens enter circulation each period, and in exchange for what behavior. The supply side is total emissions per month, broken down by reward type, in both token count and percentage of total supply.
The demand side is the rationale. The schedule and the adoption curve have to be co-designed, because the rate at which you print tokens only makes sense relative to the demand the rewards are meant to attract.
Design consequence
A front-loaded schedule, with the heaviest reward rates in the first 12 to 18 months, floods supply before the protocol has the user base and revenue to generate organic buy pressure.
Early participants then earn tokens into an oversupplied, thin-demand market, and the downward pressure from their selling discourages the next cohort from joining.
Common mistake
Teams design emissions for participation mechanics without modeling aggregate supply impact. They set reward rates to hit a target participation level, compound those rates over 48 months, and never calculate the resulting circulating supply trajectory.
The supply model, built later for the whitepaper, then reveals circulating supply will reach 60% of max by year two, inconsistent with the fully-diluted valuation the token was priced at in the seed round.
See Tokenomics Design for how this applies in practice.
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