What Is an Emission Schedule?
An emission schedule is the plan for how new tokens show up over time: miner or validator rewards, liquidity-mining drip, team unlocks, ecosystem grants. Bitcoin's schedule is the clean one, a declining block subsidy on a known clock. Most altcoins have a spreadsheet, a cliff, and a hope that demand outruns the faucet.
How It Actually Works
- Protocol emissions pay for security (staking rewards, mining) or for bootstrapping (liquidity mining). Both dilute existing holders. That can be a fair wage. It is still inflation.
- The number that matters is coins hitting the market, not total supply. A 100 billion max supply with 5 percent circulating and a steep unlock is an FDV trap. My unlock and vesting entries cover the calendar.
- Bitcoin's halving is an emission schedule with no committee. Most other schedules can be changed by a governance vote or a team key. Read whether the schedule is social or mechanical.
Risks and Common Mistakes
- Yield farming a 200 percent APY paid in the farm's own token. You are being paid in the dilution. The who-pays rule is this page in motion.
- Comparing market caps across tokens with wildly different emission paths. FDV plus the next twelve months of unlocks is the grown-up pair of numbers.
- Assuming "fixed supply" after reading a max-supply field. Mint functions, treasury wallets, and inflation switches hide in contracts.
When It Matters
Before buying anything with a team allocation, and before parking money in a farm. Unlock calendars live on DefiLlama and many token pages; treat them as load-bearing, not fine print.
Related Terms
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