How to read a token’s supply
Every listing shows a supply figure, and often three of them that disagree. The disagreement is not an error — they measure different things. Confusing them is how people arrive at a valuation that is wrong by an order of magnitude.
The three numbers
Circulating supply is what exists and is free to move: units issued, minus units destroyed, minus units that cannot move yet because a contract holds them locked. Total supply is everything that exists, locked or not. Fully diluted is everything that could ever exist if every remaining unit were issued.
So the three answer three different questions: what is trading now, what has been created, and what the ceiling is. Only the first is a fact about today. The third is a projection, and it is the one most often quoted as though it were a fact.
A market capitalisation computed on one figure and compared with a market capitalisation computed on another is not a comparison. It is two different quantities with the same name.
Which one belongs where
- What the market values today — circulating. This is what can be bought and sold, and the price applies to it.
- What one unit is backed by — circulating, always. A reserve divided by total supply flatters the number by counting units that hold no claim on it.
- What the future dilution could be — fully diluted, compared with circulating. The gap is the overhang, and the schedule that releases it matters more than its size.
- What has been issued to date — total, or an issuance counter if the protocol keeps one. This is a historical fact and does not shrink when units are burned.
Where the figures go wrong
The common failures are not exotic. Units held by the team under a lock are sometimes counted as circulating and sometimes not, and the choice moves the figure substantially. Units burned to a dead address may or may not be subtracted. Units bridged to another network can be counted on both sides at once. And a protocol that mints continuously has no stable total at all — only a total as of a block.
None of this requires bad faith. It requires only that whoever compiled the page made a choice and did not say which. That is why the useful habit is not to trust a supply figure but to reproduce it.
How to check it yourself
- Read totalSupply from the contract. That is the total, as of now, and it is not an opinion.
- List the addresses that hold large balances and identify them: a locking contract, a treasury, a bridge, a burn address. Subtract what genuinely cannot move.
- If units are locked, find the release schedule in the code rather than in the announcement. A lock with an owner who can shorten it is not a lock.
- For a fully diluted figure, find the cap in the contract. If there is no cap, there is no fully diluted figure — there is an emission rate, which is a different thing to assess.
Fifteen minutes of this gives you numbers you compiled yourself, with the choices visible. It also tells you something about the project: whether its published figures match what the contract says.
Common questions
Which figure should a market capitalisation use?
Circulating, and the page should say so. A capitalisation on fully diluted supply is a statement about a possible future, not about today, and mixing the two across projects produces comparisons that mean nothing.
Do burned tokens reduce the supply?
They reduce total supply if the contract actually destroys them. Sending units to an address nobody controls leaves them in the total while removing them from circulation — the two figures then diverge permanently, and both are correct.
Why would issued and circulating differ permanently?
Because some designs count issuance cumulatively and never reduce it, while circulation falls when units are destroyed. If a protocol prices new units off a cumulative counter, the two figures are meant to diverge and the difference is not an inconsistency.
Where this project stands on it
Assetrix keeps both kinds of figure and uses them for different things, so it is a clean example of why they must not be mixed. An issuance count records every token ever created and never falls; it drives the mint price in Phase 1. Circulation is what exists and can move; backing per token is the reserve divided by it, and never by the issuance count.
There is also a supply that is not yet supply: the collateral sitting inside open positions. It is real and it is reclaimable at any time, but it holds no claim on the common reserve until the position is closed. A page that added it to circulation would understate what each token is backed by.