Before anything else, work out where a token sits between three numbers: circulating supply, total supply, and max supply. The distance between them tells you how much of the token’s eventual supply is still locked away, and a supply schedule is really just the plan for closing that distance over time.
Circulating supply is what’s actually tradable right now — tokens on exchanges, in public wallets, or unlocked from vesting, according to CryptoRobotics and C-Sharp Corner. Total supply is everything that exists minus anything burned, including tokens still locked in vesting contracts or sitting in a treasury. Max supply is the theoretical ceiling on how many tokens will ever exist — and CryptoRobotics notes that some protocols can change that ceiling through governance, which makes it, in the site’s words, “a theoretical upper bound rather than a practical short-term metric.” The three numbers form a hierarchy: circulating supply is less than or equal to total supply, which is less than or equal to max supply.
Why the gap between the numbers matters more than either number alone
Market capitalization is calculated using only circulating supply — price multiplied by the tokens actually in the market, per CryptoRobotics and C-Sharp Corner. Fully diluted valuation (FDV) uses total or max supply instead, showing what the token would be worth if every locked token were already circulating. CoinGecko’s guide to tokenomics puts the read-across directly: a high ratio between FDV and market cap is a warning sign, because it means a large share of supply hasn’t hit the market yet.
CryptoRobotics illustrates the point with a plain comparison, in a piece published 27 January 2026: a token priced at $1 with a 10 million circulating supply is a fundamentally different asset from a token priced at $1 with 10 billion tokens already in circulation, even though the sticker price looks identical. The first token has a small market cap and could have enormous room left to dilute; the second has already put most of its supply into the market. Neither price tells you which is which — only the supply figures do.
What actually moves a token between “locked” and “circulating”
The mechanism that shifts tokens from total supply into circulating supply is vesting. Crypto Daily describes two common structures: cliff vesting, where a locked allocation releases all at once after a set lockup period, and linear vesting, where it releases gradually over time. Crypto Daily’s checklist for beginners is built around the unlock calendar itself: the date of the next unlock, how large it is relative to current circulating supply, who receives the newly unlocked tokens, whether earlier unlocks already hurt liquidity, and whether the project has enough real demand to absorb the new supply without a price drop.
CryptoRobotics makes the same point from the supply side: when a large block of tokens unlocks at once, supply rises without any guarantee that demand rises with it, which the site says typically shows up as increased selling pressure, short-term volatility, and price corrections. Neither outlet claims unlocks always cause a drop — only that the size and timing of an unlock relative to existing circulating supply is the thing worth checking, not the unlock’s existence alone.
Who actually controls the schedule
A published vesting calendar is only useful if the rules behind it can’t be quietly changed. Antier Solutions frames this as a core pre-deployment audit question: verifying who can mint new tokens, under what conditions minting is allowed, and whether the supply rules can be altered after the contract goes live. Hacken’s own tokenomics methodology, dated 15 October 2025, treats this as part of a separate review step — checking lock periods, release frequencies, cliffs, and specifically who has the governance power to modify vesting terms after the fact. A supply schedule that looks conservative on a chart is worth less if a small multisig or a governance vote can rewrite it later.
A worked comparison from actual token launches
VanEck’s blog, published 11 May 2023 and drawing on Messari data as of 30 April 2023, compared the initial token distributions of several major blockchains. It found meaningful variation in how supply was split at launch: Ethereum’s design relied on a community-driven development culture rather than heavy contributor allocations, while Solana leaned toward stronger builder incentives at some cost to community distribution, in VanEck’s assessment. For Sui, VanEck reported that half the token supply went to a Community Reserve managed by the Sui Foundation, with 14% allocated to investors according to the Sui Foundation itself. VanEck’s broader point was that there’s no single correct split — Ethereum and Solana took different approaches and both built durable networks — but that the distribution and its transparency are what a prospective holder can actually check before committing capital.
Whose numbers to trust when you’re reading an audit
Not every figure in this space carries the same weight. Hacken’s methodology document sets out specific numeric target ranges as part of its published scoring framework — for instance, monthly unlock rate under 5% of total supply, circulating supply of 10–20% at token generation event (TGE), top-10 holder concentration under 50%, and liquidity above 10% of market cap. These are Hacken’s own audit thresholds, laid out in a document dated 15 October 2025, not an industry-wide rule that every healthy token must meet.
By contrast, Tokenomics.com’s site, published 1 April 2025, promotes its track record with self-reported figures: more than 750 tokenomics audits completed, a database of over 2,500 projects, and audits used to evaluate more than $1.2B in token investments and launches. These are marketing claims from the company about itself, and this page has no independent source confirming them. The distinction matters for a reader: a numeric target range published as part of a methodology document is something you can test a token against and see the reasoning behind; a headline audit count on a vendor’s own site is a claim about that vendor’s business, not a fact about any particular token’s supply schedule.
What this page does not tell you
This page describes what to check in a supply schedule — it does not tell you the current unlock status of any specific token. For that, a reader needs the project’s own vesting contract or a live unlock tracker, checked on the date it’s read. Hacken’s numeric benchmarks are one auditor’s published methodology; this page cannot say how those specific thresholds were derived, or how often projects that pass them still fail in practice. Tokenomics.com’s audit volume and dollar-value claims are self-reported by the company and have not been verified by any third party in the evidence reviewed here. VanEck’s comparative distribution figures are dated to 30 April 2023 and will not reflect any allocation changes, unlocks, or governance votes that have happened on Ethereum, Solana, Sui, or Aptos since that date. And none of this tells a reader whether a given supply schedule is “fair” in any absolute sense — only what the standard checks for fairness and dilution risk actually look at.
Sources
Every fact above is attributed to one of these reports. Where they disagree, the article says so.
