What is Circulating Supply?
Let's find out Circulating Supply meaning, definition in crypto, what is Circulating Supply, and all other detailed facts.
A circulating supply can decrease or increase over time. New coins can be developed through mining. A centralized token supply can be increased by the developers via instantaneous minting.
However, the circulating supply can also go down in two ways - on purpose by burning, or by accident. Accidents happen when coins are being sent to an irrecoverable address, or even when losing access to a wallet where funds are stored.
The total supply and the circulating supply are two distinct supplies. The total supply is the total amount of coins produced, excluding those intentionally burnt. The maximum supply is the limit that nothing can ever exceed.
The network has zero genuine information about how much the total supply is in active circulation, therefore, the metric of circulating supply is a flawed guess.
Speaking of Bitcoin, the supply of BTC should be greater than 18 million coins, as this is the quantity of Bitcoin mined since the network's inception. However, it is suspected that almost 4 million BTC were lost forever. In regards to that, the real circulating supply is about 14 million.
A cryptocurrency's circulating supply can be used for market capitalization. To do so, multiply the current market value by the number of coins in circulation. As an example, if there were a circulating quantity of 1,000,000 coins worth $8.00 each, the market cap would be $5,000,000.