Total Supply

Total supply is a snapshot of everything a cryptocurrency's protocol has actually created up to a given moment, whether or not those coins are currently movable by anyone. It sits between two other supply metrics: it is always equal to or greater than circulating supply, and always equal to or less than maximum supply (when a project has one at all).

The gap between total and circulating supply usually comes from tokens that exist on-chain but are not yet liquid: allocations vested for the founding team, tokens locked in a treasury or foundation wallet, or amounts held in escrow to be released on a schedule. XRP is a well-known example: Ripple holds a large share of the total supply in escrow contracts and releases a capped amount each month, so circulating supply lags total supply by tens of billions of tokens. Coins that have been provably burned are subtracted from total supply, since they can never return to circulation.

Bitcoin illustrates the opposite case: because it has no reserved or vested allocations, its total supply and circulating supply are nearly identical, both climbing toward the 21 million cap defined by the protocol as new blocks are mined.

Investors watch the ratio of circulating to total supply as a rough gauge of future dilution risk: a large unreleased balance means more coins could enter the market later and pressure price, which is why the figure is closely tied to a project's broader tokenomics design.