Maximum Supply (Max Supply)

Maximum supply is the hard ceiling written into a cryptocurrency's protocol: the absolute limit on how many units can ever be created through mining, staking rewards, or any other issuance mechanism. Once that number is reached, the code itself refuses to mint anything further, unless the community agrees to a fork that rewrites the rules.

Not every project sets a cap. Bitcoin is the defining example: its 21 million limit was encoded from the start, and issuance keeps slowing through periodic halvings, with the final fraction of a coin not expected to be mined until around the year 2140. Many other assets have no fixed ceiling at all and can be issued indefinitely, though ongoing burns can offset that growth.

Because burned coins still count toward everything ever created, maximum supply is always greater than or equal to total supply, which is itself greater than or equal to circulating supply, the portion actually trading in the market. Traders use maximum supply to estimate fully diluted valuation, calculated as price multiplied by max supply, a way to gauge how much a token's price could be diluted once its remaining supply is unlocked or mined.

A hard cap is often cited as a scarcity argument, but the number alone says little about a project's health. Emission schedule, unlock timing, and how tokens are actually distributed, the details covered under tokenomics, usually matter more for long-term price behavior than the headline maximum figure.