Three supply figures get confused constantly. Circulating supply is what is liquid and held by the public now. Total supply counts everything created so far, including locked or reserved amounts, minus anything provably burned. Maximum supply is the hard ceiling written into the rules, where one exists at all. Bitcoin's cap of 21 million is a maximum supply; the amount actually in circulation is smaller and grows as blocks are mined.
The arithmetic matters because market cap is price multiplied by circulating supply, and it is used everywhere to rank assets. Change the denominator and the ranking changes with it. If a project launches with only a sliver of its <a href="/glossary/token/">tokens</a> released, its market cap can look modest while the eventual supply is far larger. Comparing that against <a href="/glossary/fully-diluted-valuation/">fully diluted valuation</a>, which prices in every token that will ever exist, exposes the gap immediately.
Locked and unvested tokens are where the picture gets distorted. Team allocations, investor tranches, treasury reserves and staking lock-ups are usually excluded from circulating supply, so they neither weigh on the price nor show up in the market cap, right up until they unlock and can be sold. A published unlock schedule tells you when that changes. Two projects with identical market caps can face entirely different supply pressure over the following year.
Data providers also disagree. There is no universal standard for what counts as circulating, so treatment of foundation holdings, escrow, burned coins and long-dormant balances differs between sources, and the same asset can show different supply and market cap on different sites. When a figure matters to you, check which source produced it and how it defines the term. Our <a href="/coins/">coin pages</a> show the underlying supply data alongside the price.
How to Evaluate a Crypto Project
Key takeaways
- Market cap is only as meaningful as the circulating supply figure feeding it, so check the input before trusting the ranking.
- A low circulating supply with a large total supply signals future dilution, which unlock schedules will tell you about.
- Different data providers count circulating supply differently, so figures for the same asset will not always match.
Circulating Supply — frequently asked questions
Are lost coins still counted as circulating?
Usually yes. Coins whose keys are gone remain on the ledger and are indistinguishable from ones simply held for a long time, so most providers keep counting them. Nobody can prove a coin is lost rather than dormant. That means true tradeable supply is somewhat smaller than the published figure for older assets, though by an amount no one can measure precisely.
Does a smaller circulating supply make a token more valuable?
No. Supply on its own says nothing about value, because price adjusts to whatever the unit count is. A token with few units and a high price can be worth the same in total as one with many cheap units. What matters is total value against what the project does, plus how much new supply is scheduled to arrive.
New to crypto, or filling in the gaps? Work through the essentials in Learn, browse every term A–Z, or see live prices for the coins these concepts power.