Circulating Supply
The number of tokens currently tradeable in the market, excluding locked, vested, or burned tokens.
Circulating supply counts only tokens that are publicly available for trading — excluding tokens held in team vesting contracts (not yet unlocked), protocol treasuries under time locks, tokens locked in liquidity mining contracts, and burned tokens. It is used to calculate market capitalisation: price × circulating supply.
Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV) uses total maximum supply instead of circulating supply — including all tokens that will ever be issued. The ratio of market cap to FDV reveals how much potential selling pressure may emerge from future unlocks. A token trading at a $500M market cap but $5B FDV has 90% of its supply still unvested and scheduled to enter the market — a significant bearish overhang.
Circulating supply can change rapidly through vesting unlocks, token burns, new emissions, or treasury movements. Token Unlocks, Coingecko, and Messari track circulating supply changes and upcoming unlock events that could affect price. Monitoring cliff unlocks — where a large tranche vests on a specific date — is an important part of tokenomics analysis.