Difference between revisions of "Total supply, circulating supply, and staked ICP"

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===Paying for compute and storage===
 
===Paying for compute and storage===
  
Dapp and smart contract developers pay for computation and storage costs wit cycles. Cycles are acquired from the NNS by paying in ICP (which are burned).
+
Dapp and smart contract developers pay for computation and storage costs with cycles. Cycles are acquired from the NNS by paying in ICP (which are burned).
  
 
To see the IC computation and storage costs as cycles, please see [https://smartcontracts.org/docs/developers-guide/computation-and-storage-costs.html Computation and Storage Costs].
 
To see the IC computation and storage costs as cycles, please see [https://smartcontracts.org/docs/developers-guide/computation-and-storage-costs.html Computation and Storage Costs].

Revision as of 05:27, 25 February 2022

Understanding the supply of a token is important to many people in the crypto community.

The total supply of ICP is variable with both burning (deflationary) and minting (inflationary) mechanisms. The circulating supply of ICP is also affected by the unlocking of neurons from early contributors (seed round contributors are on multi-year vesting for example).

Total supply and circulating supply

Total supply

Total supply is the sum of all the tokens in the system (whether they are locked/staked or not).

The total supply is a changing number so its most recent number can seen in the IC dashboard.

Total supply

Circulating supply is the sum of all the tokens that have been counted as "circulating". This includes all tokens that have ever been liquid in the system (even if they were subsequently staked).

The circulating supply is a changing number so its most recent number can seen in the IC dashboard.

Staked ICP

Staked ICP supply is the sum of all the tokens that are locked in neurons.

The amount of ICP staked is a changing number so most recent number can seen in the neurons dashboard.

At network Genesis

As of May 10, 2021:

  • Total supply: 429 Million
  • Circulating supply: 123 million

Current Status

As of February 23, 2022:

  • Total supply: 477 Million
  • Circulating supply: 207 million (42.4% of Total supply)
  • Staked ICP: 275 million (57.6% of Total supply)

Inflationary mechanisms

The NNS mints ICP tokens for two reasons:

  • NNS can mint ICP to pay for NNS rewards (e.g. Staking). As of February 2022, this is the 95-99% of current minting.
  • NNS can mint ICP to pay for node providers

Paying staking rewards

Voting rewards are paid by minting ICP, although this minting only happens at the moment rewards are spawned, maturity is merged, or the neuron is disbursed.

In the first year, the NNS allocates 10% of the total supply to generate voting rewards. Note the term "allocates" rather than "mints", because rewards are not minted until they are spawn, merged or the neuron is disbursed, so total supply is not automatically increased by rewards alone. This allocation rate drops quadratically until it reaches 5% by year 8. Like all parameters in the NNS, the minting rate can be changed via NNS proposals, but this is the current rate schedule.

The amount of ICP minted for NNS rewards can be seen in the "Total Rewards" chart.

See more in Staking,_voting_and_rewards.

Paying node providers

Node providers are paid for their nodes.

The amount of ICP minted for compute can be seen in the "Total Rewards" chart.

Deflationary mechanisms

There are three main cases for burning ICP:

  • Minting cycles to pay for compute and storage burns ICP to create cycles
  • Burning of transaction fees
  • Burning of the 1 ICP deposit for failed proposals; note that this only happens at disbursement or merging of neurons, so accumulated fees can persist for a while before finally contributing to deflation.

The amount of ICP burged since Genesis is listed in the "Total ICP Burned" chart in the IC circulation dashboard.

Paying for compute and storage

Dapp and smart contract developers pay for computation and storage costs with cycles. Cycles are acquired from the NNS by paying in ICP (which are burned).

To see the IC computation and storage costs as cycles, please see Computation and Storage Costs.

Transaction fees

Transferring ICP across accounts costs 0.0001 ICP.

Failed NNS proposals

It costs 1 ICP to submit a proposal. If the proposal is rejected, the 1 ICP is burned.

Unlocking & vesting of neurons

Because the IC took years of R&D (at Genesis, the DFINITY foundation was over 200 full time members), there have been three main rounds and one airdrop event.

For a breakdown of the different rounds and vesting schedules, see Messsari's report "Introduction to ICP".

The unlocking of neurons has been the largest contributing factor to circulating supply since Genesis.