Circulating Supply

Circulating supply is the number of units of a cryptocurrency that are publicly available and moving in the market — excluding coins that are locked, reserved, or not yet issued. It is the supply figure used to calculate market cap, which is why data sites track it carefully: market cap equals price times circulating supply.

The distinction from other supply measures matters. Total supply counts all coins created so far, including locked team allocations; max supply is the ceiling that can ever exist. Bitcoin's circulating supply, for example, is over 19 million BTC and grows slowly with each mined block toward the 21 million cap. A new token, by contrast, might have a max supply of 1 billion but a circulating supply of only 100 million, with the rest held by the team and investors under vesting schedules that release tokens over the coming years.

A common misconception is that a low circulating supply makes a token scarce and therefore valuable; if large locked allocations will unlock later, current holders face ongoing dilution as new tokens hit the market, which is why experienced analysts compare market cap against fully diluted valuation. Circulating supply is also partly an estimate — coins in lost wallets (including an estimated few million BTC) are still counted as circulating even though they will likely never move, because no one can prove they are gone for good.