Almost everything that moves a cryptocurrency price is unknowable in advance. Supply is the exception. How many tokens exist, how many will exist, and when the difference arrives are usually written down in a document the project published before it launched. It is one of the few genuinely knowable things in this market, and it is routinely overlooked.
The three supply figures
Coin pages show up to three supply numbers, and they answer different questions.
Circulating supply is what is available and trading now. It excludes tokens that are locked in vesting contracts, held in a treasury that has not distributed them, reserved for future programmes, or provably destroyed. This is the figure used to calculate market cap.
Total supply is everything that has been issued, minus anything burned. The gap between total and circulating is the portion that exists but is not yet free to trade — typically locked allocations.
Maximum supply is the hard ceiling written into the protocol, where one exists. Bitcoin's is 21 million. Many tokens have one; some, including Ethereum, do not, and their supply changes according to issuance and burn mechanics rather than approaching a fixed cap.
The relationship between these three tells you where an asset is in its issuance life. Circulating close to maximum means the supply story is largely finished. Circulating far below maximum means most of the eventual supply is still to arrive, and someone has decided when.
What a token unlock is
Most projects do not issue everything at launch. Allocations to founders, employees, early investors, advisers, the treasury and ecosystem incentives are usually held in contracts that release them gradually — a vesting schedule, borrowed from how startup equity works.
A typical schedule has a cliff, a period during which nothing releases at all, commonly six to twelve months. At the cliff a first tranche unlocks, often a meaningful chunk at once. After that, tokens release linearly, monthly or daily, over a further one to four years.
The purpose is alignment: insiders who cannot sell for two years have a reason to care about year two. The side effect is a predictable stream of new supply entering the market on dates that are, in most cases, publicly documented.
Why unlocks matter to price
Every unlocked token is a token that can be sold, held by someone whose cost basis is usually far below the current price. A seed investor who paid a cent for tokens now trading at a dollar has a hundredfold gain and every ordinary reason to realise some of it.
That does not mean unlocks always cause a fall. The market is not naive, and a well-telegraphed unlock in a liquid asset can be absorbed with little visible effect — sometimes with a relief rally afterwards, once an anticipated overhang has passed. What matters is the size of the unlock relative to daily trading volume.
The arithmetic is worth doing explicitly. A token trading $5 million a day that unlocks $50 million of new supply in a single tranche is releasing ten days of total volume into the market at once. Even if only a fraction sells, it dominates the order book. The same $50 million unlock in an asset trading $2 billion a day is a rounding error.
This ratio — unlock size against daily volume — is the single most useful number when assessing whether a scheduled unlock is likely to matter. It is also easy to calculate: both inputs are published.
Who receives the tokens
Not all unlocks are equivalent, and the allocation table in a project's documentation tells you which kind you are looking at.
Tokens released to early investors are the most likely to reach the market, because that is what a financial investor's tokens are for. Funds have return obligations and exit schedules.
Tokens released to the team vary. Some sell to diversify, entirely reasonably; some hold. Team allocations are usually smaller than investor allocations, but they are also more visible, and sales from team wallets are frequently tracked and publicised.
Tokens released to a treasury or foundation may not be sold at all — they might fund grants, development or liquidity provision. They also might be sold, over time, to fund operations. Treasury releases are the hardest to predict.
Tokens released as ecosystem or liquidity incentives are designed to be distributed to users, and users who receive tokens for providing liquidity or farming yield sell them at a high rate. This category reliably produces persistent selling pressure rather than a single event.
A project releasing five percent of supply to a foundation for a grant programme is in a different position from one releasing five percent to a fund that raised at a hundredth of the current price.
How to check a supply schedule
The information is not hidden, but it is not on the price page either.
Start with the project's own documentation. Most publish a tokenomics section covering the allocation split, the cliff and the vesting period. This is the primary source and it is usually specific.
Cross-check against the circulating and total supply on a data site. If circulating is thirty percent of total, seventy percent is pending, and the documentation should tell you over what period.
Compare market cap to fully diluted valuation. The ratio is a quick proxy for the same thing: an FDV five times market cap means the current price applied to all eventual supply implies a valuation five times what the market is currently pricing.
Where the project publishes unlock dates, note the large ones and compare each against average daily volume. Several independent trackers now aggregate these schedules across projects, which saves reading a dozen documents.
Burns, and the other direction
Supply can also decrease. Token burns permanently remove units from circulation by sending them to an address nobody controls, and some protocols burn continuously as part of their fee mechanism rather than as one-off events.
Burns are frequently marketed as bullish, and mechanically reducing supply does support price all else being equal. The caveats are worth keeping. A burn of tokens that were never in circulation — unissued treasury supply, for instance — changes the headline number without changing anything about the market. And a burn funded by protocol revenue only matters in proportion to that revenue: a mechanism burning a small amount annually against a large float has a marginal effect however it is announced.
The useful question is what percentage of circulating supply is actually being removed per year, and whether the tokens being burned were ever going to trade.
Inflation is not automatically bad
Some protocols issue new tokens indefinitely to pay validators or miners for securing the network. This is often described as inflationary and treated as a negative, which is too simple.
Issuance is a cost paid for security, and networks need to pay it. What matters is the rate relative to demand, and whether anything offsets it. Ethereum, for instance, both issues new supply to validators and burns a portion of transaction fees; in periods of high network activity the burn can exceed issuance and supply falls. A network issuing eight percent a year with no offsetting mechanism is in a different position from one issuing one percent with a burn attached.
Look at the net rate, not the label.
The practical version
Before buying a token, three checks take about ten minutes and rule out a recurring category of unpleasant surprise. What proportion of maximum supply is circulating now? When do the largest remaining tranches unlock, and how big are they against daily volume? Who receives them, and what are those recipients likely to do?
None of this predicts price. It does mean that when a token falls twenty percent on a Tuesday and the explanation turns out to be an unlock scheduled two years ago, you were not among the people finding out afterwards.
Coinvilo publishes circulating, total and maximum supply alongside market cap and fully diluted valuation on every coin page. This article is educational and is not financial, investment or tax advice.