What is Circulating Supply?
Circulating supply is the number of tokens that are liquid and available to the market right now — excluding locked, vested-not-yet-released, burned and treasury-held tokens.
Also known as: tokens in circulation · circulating tokens · float
In plain terms
Circulating supply is the part of a token's total supply that can actually be bought and sold today. The rest sits in vesting contracts, treasuries or locked programs.
It grows over time as vesting releases tokens and shrinks if tokens are burned or locked again, so it is a moving number, not a fixed one.
How it works
Calculating it requires tracing every allocation's vesting status: tokens released by smart contracts count; tokens still held under lockup do not.
Publishers differ on edge cases — whether team tokens past vesting count immediately, how staked tokens are treated — so two sources can report different circulating supplies for the same token.
Market capitalization quoted on data sites is usually price times circulating supply; price times total or fully diluted supply gives very different, larger figures.
Example
Hypothetical: total supply is 1,000,000,000 tokens; 10% released at TGE, team vesting adds 8,000,000 per month after the cliff. Six months after TGE, circulating supply is roughly 100,000,000 + 48,000,000 = 148,000,000, or about 15% of total.
Why it matters for founders and investors
Circulating supply determines the market capitalization investors see and how much of the supply could still hit the market — the gap between circulating and total supply is future potential selling pressure.
For founders, projecting circulating supply month by month is essential to anticipating unlock pressure and communicating honestly with the market.
Common misconceptions
Circulating supply is an estimate, not an exact fact. Different trackers use different rules, so figures can differ by meaningful percentages.
A low circulating supply is not automatically bullish: it can simply mean most of the supply will unlock later, which is a risk rather than a virtue.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between circulating and total supply?
Circulating supply counts only tokens available to the market now; total supply counts all tokens created, including locked and unvested ones. The difference is tokens that can enter the market in the future.
Why do different sites show different circulating supplies?
Because they apply different rules for staked, vesting and treasury tokens. Checking the methodology, or the project's own on-chain data, gives a more reliable number.