Total supply, circulating supply, and staked ICP

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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

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

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

  • 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 deflatio

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.