Circulating Supply

Circulating Supply refers to the number of coins or tokens of a specific cryptocurrency that are publicly available to buy or sell.

If you can trade them, they are considered circulating.

Crypto projects often don’t release all of a cryptocurrency’s supply to the market, instead waiting to mine or mint more coins in the future.

Circulating supply can be used to determine a cryptocurrency’s market capitalization (MCAP) by multiplying the current market price by the number of coins or tokens in circulation.

MARKET CAPITALIZATION = CIRCULATING SUPPLY x ASSET’S MARKET PRICE

For example, Bitcoin (BTC) has a circulating supply of roughly 19 million coins.

Let’s say its current price is USD $21,000.

Therefore, its market cap would be 19 million X $21K = USD $399 billion.

Circulating supply shouldn’t be confused with Total Supply or Max Supply.

Related Terms

Token

A Token is a digital asset that operates on a parent blockchain or on another digital asset’s blockchain because it doesn’t have a blockchain of its own. The term “token” also tends to describe almost all other cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin and Ethereum, the two largest cryptocurrencies in existence today. Tokens have multiple purposes and use cases.

Market Capitalization (Market Cap)

Market Capitalization (Market Cap) is a total dollar value given to an asset (like Bitcoin), or an entire asset class (all cryptocurrencies), calculated by taking that asset’s circulating supply and multiplying it by the market price of that asset.

Total Supply

Total Supply refers to the total amount of coins or tokens of a specific cryptocurrency that have been created or mined, that are in circulation, including those that are locked or reserved. Coins that have been burned or destroyed should be subtracted from the total supply amount.

XRP

XRP, launched in 2012, is the native currency that runs on the XRP Ledger (XRPL), a public, open-sourced, permissionless, and decentralized blockchain that anybody can contribute to or transact on. XRP is used on the XRPL, which is a payment settlement, asset exchange, and remittance network for global payments used by private financial businesses and […]

Altcoin

Short for “alternative coin” or “bitcoin alternative”, it’s a category given to any coin or token other than Bitcoin (BTC).