In this track: Digital value and units
Total supply versus circulating supply
Contract accounting and estimates of market availability answer different questions.
A board game may have a thousand printed tickets while only six hundred are in players’ hands. Counting all tickets differs from estimating active circulation.
1 ETH = 1000000000 Gwei = 1000000000000000000 Wei.
Total supply is contract information
An ERC-20 totalSupply call reports the quantity under that implementation’s accounting rules. Formatting the raw result requires the token’s scale. You also need the correct contract and network before the number has a clear identity.
Circulation uses a methodology
A circulating-supply estimate may exclude locked, reserved or otherwise unavailable holdings. Providers can make different choices about those categories. There is no single ERC-20 method that automatically returns a universally agreed circulating supply.
Burns and locks are not identical
A contract-level burn may reduce its tracked total supply. Transferring tokens to an inaccessible address can leave totalSupply unchanged. A time lock might restrict movement temporarily while still leaving the tokens in the total.
Keep claims precise
When reading supply figures, identify whether they come from a contract or a separate methodology, and note the time and network. A supply number alone does not establish value, demand or a reliable market capitalization.
Does ERC-20 define a universal circulatingSupply method?
totalSupply is part of the interface; circulating supply generally depends on a separate methodology.
Original explanations by EtherTools. Examples are educational and source-linked; this site is independent of the Ethereum Foundation. Our approach.