What is circulating supply?
The number of coins or tokens currently issued and freely tradable, excluding amounts that are locked, reserved, or not yet created.
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In this entry
The number of coins or tokens currently issued and freely tradable, excluding amounts that are locked, reserved, or not yet created.
It is the denominator in market cap, which is price multiplied by circulating supply, so a wrong circulating figure produces a wrong market cap and a wrong position in every ranking table. Data providers each apply their own judgment about what counts as circulating, and they do not always agree.
The mistake worth avoiding is reading a low circulating supply as scarcity. If most of the supply is locked and scheduled to unlock over the next two years, the coins are not absent. They are queued.
How it works
Three numbers describe a token's supply and they answer different questions.
| Measure | What it counts | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Circulating supply | Issued and freely tradable now | The denominator of market cap |
| Total supply | Issued, including locked and staked | How much exists today |
| Max supply | The protocol ceiling, if any | Whether issuance ever ends |
Illustrative structure; not every token defines a max supply.
Exclusions are where the judgment happens. Tokens held by a foundation treasury, allocated to a team under a vesting schedule, or locked in an escrow contract are normally excluded. Tokens burned are excluded permanently. Coins presumed lost, such as early Bitcoin nobody has moved, are conventionally still counted as circulating, because there is no way to prove a key is gone.
Circulating supply grows over time on almost every asset. Mining and staking issue new units, and vesting schedules release existing ones. fdv projects what market cap would be if the entire supply were circulating today.
Example
Illustrative. A token trades at 2 dollars with 100 million circulating and 1 billion total supply. Market cap is 200 million dollars, and fully diluted valuation is 2 billion. Over the next year 150 million tokens unlock on schedule. For the market cap to stay at 200 million dollars with 250 million circulating, price must fall to 80 cents. That is not a prediction, it is arithmetic showing how much new demand the schedule requires just to hold a valuation flat.
Why it matters when you buy
A coin can look small by market cap and be large by fully diluted valuation, and the gap between the two is a scheduled supply increase you can read in advance. The unlock pressure page ranks coins by near-term scheduled supply, and the coin pages show circulating alongside total supply.
Related terms
market cap — price times circulating supply; fdv — the same sum at full supply; unlock — scheduled increases in circulating supply; emission schedule — the rate new units are issued; burn — permanent removal from supply.
Questions
Why do sites report different market caps for the same coin?
Because they use different circulating supply figures. Providers each judge which locked, treasury, or team allocations to exclude, and those judgments rarely match exactly.
Are lost coins counted as circulating?
Conventionally yes, since nobody can prove a private key is unrecoverable. Estimates of lost Bitcoin exist but are inferences from address inactivity, not verified figures.
Does staked crypto count as circulating?
It usually does, because the holder can normally unstake and sell subject to an unbonding period. Tokens locked by a vesting contract with no ability to withdraw are the ones typically excluded.
Guides that use this term
- How to Verify a Token Contract Address Before You Buy
A token's contract address is its only real identity, so verifying one means getting the address from the project's own official channel, confirming the same address independently from a second source, and checking on a block explorer that the contract is what it claims to be before you trade against it.
- What Is a Memecoin, and Why Most Lose Their Value
A memecoin is a token whose price rests on attention rather than on revenue, a product, or a claim on any asset, and the structural reason most end up worthless is that attention is the only thing holding the price up and it always moves on to something else.