What is emission schedule?
The published plan for how many new units of a token will be created over time and where they go.
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The published plan for how many new units of a token will be created over time and where they go.
It determines how much supply arrives each month, which is a direct and knowable source of selling pressure, unlike most things people speculate about. A schedule may front-load rewards to attract early users, taper on a curve, or halve at intervals. Read it alongside the unlock schedule for insiders, since together they describe total new supply. Project documentation and the contract itself are the primary sources.
The mistake is reading a maximum supply figure and stopping there. A cap tells you where issuance ends. The schedule tells you how fast you get there, and the pace over the next year is what actually meets the order book.
How it works
Emissions are new units created by the protocol and paid to someone for doing something: securing the chain, providing liquidity, or simply holding. They are separate from an unlock, which releases units that already exist but were locked for insiders or a treasury.
Schedules come in a few shapes:
| Shape | Mechanism | Example asset class |
|---|---|---|
| Halving | Reward cut by half at fixed intervals | Proof-of-work coins |
| Decaying curve | Rate falls continuously toward a floor | Several proof-of-stake chains |
| Fixed rate | Constant units per block or per epoch | Simple reward tokens |
| Demand-linked | Issuance varies with how much is staked | Ethereum's validator rewards |
Bitcoin is the cleanest published case: the block subsidy halves every 210,000 blocks and total supply approaches 21 million (source: Bitcoin developer documentation). Because the block interval is held near ten minutes by difficulty adjustment, that schedule is predictable in calendar time as well as in blocks.
For most other tokens the schedule lives in the contract and in the project's own documentation, and governance can sometimes change it. Where a token can be burned, net supply change is issuance minus burn, which is why a chain can issue new units and still shrink.
Example
Illustrative arithmetic. A token has 100 million units circulating and emits 1 million per month to liquidity providers. That is 12 million over a year, a 12% increase in circulating supply. If daily trading volume is $2 million and the token trades at $1, the monthly emission equals half a day's volume. Recipients selling even part of it is a persistent bid taken out of the book, and none of that is hidden or unpredictable.
Why it matters when you buy
New supply arriving each month is the part of a token's future you can actually read in advance, and it sets a floor on how much buying is needed just to hold price flat. Compare a token's emissions against the unlocks already scheduled at the unlock pressure ranking and its measured depth at the liquidity pages.
Related terms
circulating supply — what emissions add to, unlock — locked supply being released instead, bitcoin halving — the best-known schedule, block subsidy — the reward being emitted, burn — issuance running the other way, fdv — valuing the eventual total.
Questions
Where do I find a token's emission schedule?
In the project's own documentation and, definitively, in the contract that mints the tokens. Aggregator summaries are convenient but frequently stale, so treat the project's primary sources as the authority.
Is an emission the same as an unlock?
No. An emission creates new units that did not exist. An unlock releases units already created but held under a vesting contract. Both add to circulating supply and both should be read together.
Can a project change its emission schedule?
Where the parameters sit behind governance or an upgradeable contract, yes. Bitcoin's cannot be changed without every node agreeing to new rules, which is a very different situation from a token whose issuance is a settable variable.