What Is Circulating Supply?
Circulating supply is the number of coins or tokens considered freely tradable in the market right now. Market cap is calculated by multiplying price by this figure; locked and unissued tokens are usually excluded.
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Circulating supply is the number of coins or tokens considered freely tradable in the market right now. It is the figure used to calculate market capitalization: price multiplied by circulating supply. Locked team allocations, treasury holdings and tokens that have not yet been issued are usually left out.
How is circulating supply calculated?
The basic approach is to take all tokens created so far and subtract those that are locked or otherwise unavailable. Typical exclusions include team and investor allocations still under vesting, foundation or treasury wallets, and undistributed reward pools. The data usually comes from project disclosures combined with on-chain addresses.
Which addresses count as locked is a methodology decision made by each data provider. That’s why the same token can show different circulating supply figures on different sites. Before relying on a number, check when it was last updated and how the provider defines it.
Circulating vs total vs max supply
- Circulating supply: the amount available in the market today.
- Total supply: all tokens created and not burned, including locked ones.
- Maximum supply: the most that can ever exist under the protocol’s rules. Not every asset has one.
Imagine a token with a max supply of 1 billion, a total supply of 600 million and a circulating supply of 200 million. At $2, its market cap is $400 million. Its fully diluted valuation (FDV), using max supply at the same price, is $2 billion. A wide gap between the two signals how much supply is still to come.
How is Bitcoin’s circulating supply counted?
Bitcoin has no team or investor allocation; new BTC enters circulation only through mining rewards. As a result, every bitcoin mined so far is counted as circulating. That figure includes coins whose private keys have been lost and can never move again, and nobody knows exactly how many there are.
The blockchain can’t tell you whether a long-dormant address belongs to someone who lost their keys or a patient long-term holder. Data providers therefore generally don’t subtract dormant balances.
Why does circulating supply matter?
You need circulating supply to make sense of both price and market cap. A token with a tiny unit price can still have a very large market cap if billions of units circulate. Conversely, a token with a small float and a large locked supply may face significant dilution during future token unlocks.
If the price stays flat while circulating supply grows, market cap rises. That increase reflects a bigger quantity in the calculation, not fresh money flowing in.
Newly listed tokens often launch with only a small fraction of total supply in circulation, a setup commonly described as “low float, high FDV”. As locked tokens vest, circulating supply can grow several times over. For these tokens, the unlock schedule tells you more than today’s market cap alone.
Frequently asked questions
Why do websites show different circulating supply numbers? Each data provider decides which wallets to treat as locked and updates its data on its own schedule.
Can circulating supply go down? Yes. Token burns, or tokens bought back by a project and locked away, can reduce it.
How can I verify circulating supply? Compare the project’s published allocation table, the addresses of its locked wallets and the total supply recorded in the token contract. Disclosures that don’t match on-chain data deserve extra scrutiny.