Originally published at https://mrnasdog.com/research/ada/inflation
Looking for the buy-or-sell answer? It is on the ADA coin page, with demand and price drivers: mrnasdog.com/research/ada
ADA Inflation Analysis · October 2026 · Supply was growing · trend cooling
Cardano (ADA) supply grew +0.71% in the 90 days from Jul 23 to Oct 21 2026, and we expect only about +0.29% over the next 90 days. Stakers received 111.04M ADA of rewards from the protocol reserve, and DRep votes released 154.66M ADA from the on-chain treasury, while gifts sent 532,984 ADA back to it. ADA has a hard cap of 45B and burns nothing; the treasury spending cap now has only about 42.6M ADA left until July 2027, which is why the next 90 days look much quieter.
The verdict, in one paragraph
Over the last 90 days the circulating ADA supply rose by 265.17M ADA, a net +0.71% of the 37.57B ADA now in circulation. Market-data trackers read +0.75% for the same 90 days, a gap of just 0.04 percentage points, so the two readings agree and no warning flag is shown. More than half of the growth came from one source: treasury spending voted by Cardano’s DReps, led by the 120M ADA Cardano PRIME DeFi program paid on Aug 17 2026. With the spending cap almost used up and nothing new likely to pass, the next 90 days fall back to staking rewards alone, about 107.88M ADA or +0.29%. Cardano is a capped chain whose supply grows from a shrinking reserve plus voted treasury payouts.
Sell pressure: where new ADA comes from
Protocol inflation (111.04M ADA). Cardano’s 45B ADA cap was set at launch, and about 6.05B ADA still sits in the protocol reserve. Every five-day epoch the reserve releases 0.3% of what it holds, adds the fees users paid, and sends 20% of that pot to the treasury. The rest pays stake pools and delegators. Between Jul 23 and Oct 21 2026 this put 111.04M ADA of new rewards into circulation, about 6.2M ADA per epoch. Because each release is a fixed share of a smaller reserve, the reward stream shrinks a little every epoch: we expect about 107.88M ADA over the next 90 days.
Vesting unlocks (0). ADA has no vesting schedule. The coins from the 2015–2017 sale and the founding allocations were handed out when Cardano launched in 2017, so there is no team or investor unlock calendar to track.
Foundation and unscheduled unlocks (154.66M ADA). The Cardano treasury is an on-chain pot that sits outside the circulating supply. ADA only leaves it when holders’ representatives, the DReps, and the Constitutional Committee approve a treasury withdrawal. In this window three batches were enacted: five withdrawals worth 32.88M ADA on Jul 28 2026, led by 25.4M ADA for Intersect’s governance and technical budget; 1.79M ADA for Daedalus wallet maintenance on Aug 2 2026; and 120M ADA for Cardano PRIME on Aug 17 2026. Together that is 154.66M ADA. For the next 90 days we count none: the three open requests (22M, 9.6M and 0.94M ADA) have almost no DRep support, and the spending cap leaves only about 42.6M ADA anyway.
Long-term locked or bankruptcy (0). No bankruptcy estate, court case or government holder is waiting to release a large pile of ADA.
Buy pressure: where new ADA goes
Programmatic buyback (0). No contract and no treasury buys ADA back on the market. Cardano’s treasury moves the other way: when it spends, ADA enters circulation.
Protocol fee burn (0). Cardano burns nothing. Transaction fees go into the epoch’s reward pot, where most come back to stakers and 20% goes to the treasury. Users paid about 986K ADA in fees over the 90 days, including a record of about 338K ADA in the epoch that began Oct 6 2026, so even busy days remove very little from circulation.
Foundation buy (0). The Cardano Foundation reported 561.4M ADA at the end of 2025, down from 599.1M ADA a year earlier, so it has been a seller, not a buyer. Funds and companies that buy ADA buy coins that already circulate.
New long-term lock (0). Staking on Cardano is liquid: delegated ADA never leaves the owner’s wallet and can be spent at any time. About 21.5B ADA is staked, and all of it still counts as circulating.
Gifts to the treasury (532,984 ADA). Since the Conway era anyone can donate ADA to the treasury inside a normal transaction. In these 90 days holders sent 532,984 ADA this way, mostly in two gifts in August 2026 (about 70K and 347K ADA) and two in October 2026 (55K and 60K ADA). Gifts are rare and unplanned, so we count none for the next 90 days.
Foundation and overhang
Only two piles of ADA sit outside the circulating supply. The protocol reserve, about 6.05B ADA, pays out mechanically through staking rewards and is already counted in the protocol inflation line. The on-chain treasury holds about 1.39B ADA and can release coins only through enacted governance votes. Its Net Change Limit, agreed by DReps in July 2026, caps withdrawals at 500M ADA from Feb 13 2026 to about Jul 3 2027; about 457.4M ADA of that is used, leaving roughly 42.6M ADA. We read both piles on-chain at every rebuild.
Other large holders already count as circulating, so their moves add nothing new. Intersect’s vendor contracts, which hold the funded 2026 budget and pay projects by milestone, held about 201.67M ADA plus stablecoins in early October 2026; the PRIME program’s 120M ADA is administered the same way; and the Cardano Foundation held 561.4M ADA at the end of 2025. Unused money from these programs can be sent back to the treasury, which would take it out of circulation again.
If the treasury’s balance falls between our checks because a new withdrawal is enacted, that outflow enters the Foundation and unscheduled unlocks line at the next refresh.
How ADA compares to other proof-of-stake Layer 1 chains
Cardano sits between Bitcoin and most proof-of-stake chains. Like Bitcoin, ADA has a hard cap, 45B ADA, and new coins come from a pool that was fixed at the start. But Bitcoin cuts its new supply in steps at each halving, while Cardano releases a fixed 0.3% of the remaining reserve every five days, so the ADA reward stream fades smoothly instead of in jumps. Today the reserve adds about 0.29% of circulating supply per 90 days, and that share keeps falling.
Compared with Ethereum, the difference is the burn. Ethereum has no cap and pays validators new ETH, but it destroys part of every fee, so heavy use can offset new supply. Cardano has a cap but no burn at all: fees are recycled into rewards and the treasury, so network activity never takes ADA out of circulation. Solana also pays stakers new coins on a schedule that steps down each year, and it burns part of its fees; ADA’s schedule is lower in percentage terms but has no such offset.
What makes Cardano unusual is its on-chain treasury. Few Layer 1 chains let holders vote coins out of a protocol treasury directly, and on Cardano those votes can move supply more than staking does, as they did in this window. The spending cap is the main brake, so ADA’s supply growth depends on governance as much as on code.
What to watch in the next 90 days
Nov 16 2026: the 22M ADA request for a Cardano copper reserve expires unless DReps back it; it had about 0.24% DRep support at our check.
Nov 21 2026: two smaller treasury requests, 9.6M ADA and 0.94M ADA, reach the end of their voting time.
A new spending cap: any new Net Change Limit vote before July 2027 would reopen treasury spending beyond the 42.6M ADA left today, and would be the biggest change to the next-90-day reading.
The Dijkstra hard fork: testing continues with no mainnet date. None of the published changes alters the reserve release or the 20% treasury share, but any proposal to change those two settings would move the protocol inflation line.
Summary
Cardano’s ADA supply grew +0.71% in the 90 days to Oct 21 2026, from 111.04M ADA of staking rewards and 154.66M ADA of governance-approved treasury spending, with no burn and no buyback to offset them. The next 90 days should be calmer, about +0.29%, because the reserve release keeps shrinking and only about 42.6M ADA of treasury spending is still allowed before July 2027. The key risk is governance: a new spending cap or a large approved request would add supply quickly. The ceiling is fixed at 45B ADA, of which about 37.57B circulates today.
MrNasDog Pressure Framework analysis of ADA, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Checked Oct 21 2026.
Original: https://mrnasdog.com/research/ada/inflation · Data + explanation only. Not financial advice.