Originally published at mrnasdog.com/research/dot/inflation by MrNasDog.

➜ Start with the Polkadot coin page for the short answer (should you buy DOT?) and its price drivers: mrnasdog.com/research/dot

DOT Inflation Analysis · October 2026 · Supply growing · projected to keep growing

Polkadot (DOT) is mildly inflationary. Its issuance curve minted 13.78M DOT between Jul 25 and Oct 23 2026, and almost nothing was burned, so the DOT supply grew +0.81% in 90 days, with the same +0.81% expected over the next 90. Other trackers read +0.78%. New DOT comes only from a fixed yearly amount of 55.93M DOT, set by the vote that capped Polkadot at 2.1B DOT, and that amount does not change until about Mar 14 2028.

The verdict, in one paragraph

DOT supply rose +0.81% over the last 90 days, and the next 90 days project the same +0.81%. Other trackers read +0.78% for the same window, a gap of 0.03 percentage points, so the two readings agree and no warning flag is shown. Polkadot sells no tokens on a calendar, has no team unlock left and runs no buyback; its whole supply story is one steady issuance stream against a burn that is close to zero. The cite-able label: a capped, slowly inflating network where every new DOT is printed on a fixed curve.

Sell pressure: where new DOT comes from

Protocol inflation is the only source of new DOT: 13.78M DOT in 90 days. Since the March 2026 cut, the Polkadot runtime mints a fixed 55.93M DOT a year, about 153,100 DOT a day, in small amounts every minute. The yearly amount is 13.14% of the gap between the supply in March 2026 and the 2.1B DOT cap. On-chain, the DOT total supply rose by 13.78M between Jul 25 and Oct 23 2026, matching the curve to within a few hundred DOT. About 45% of each day’s new DOT goes to stakers, about 23% pays validators, and about 32% goes into a protocol pool that governance controls. The pool’s share is new supply all the same: those DOT exist and can be spent.

Vesting unlocks are 0. Polkadot has no team or investor unlock calendar. The small vesting schedules still on-chain belong to coins that are already counted as circulating, so their release adds nothing to the DOT supply.

Foundation and unscheduled unlocks are 0. The Polkadot Treasury paid out about 2.85M DOT in the window, and the protocol pool will pay out what it collects, but every one of those DOT is already counted in the 1.71B circulating supply. Spending them moves existing coins from one wallet to another; it does not create new ones.

Long-term locked or bankruptcy is 0. There is no bankruptcy estate, court-held pile or exchange recovery fund of DOT waiting to be released.

Buy pressure: where new DOT goes

Programmatic buyback is 0. No contract and no treasury buys DOT on the market. On Aug 21 2026 a Wish for Change referendum passed asking that all future revenue from JAM storage sales be burned, and a follow-up vote to name a keyless burn account was rejected on Sep 27 2026. That product has not launched, so the wish has burned nothing yet.

Protocol fee burn is 0. Polkadot used to destroy part of its fees and part of the unspent Treasury. Since the March 2026 upgrade, transaction fees, slashes and smart-contract burns all go into the protocol pool instead, and the Treasury burn has ended. The one burn left is blockspace revenue: cores sell for about 10 DOT each per 28-day period, so the burn is a few thousand DOT a quarter at most, too small to show against 13.78M of new DOT. A pending runtime change would send even that into the pool.

Foundation buy is 0. No foundation buys DOT for the network. The US spot DOT fund that opened in March 2026 and the new dotUSD liquidity pool hold coins that already circulate, so they take nothing out of the count.

New long-term lock is 0. About 919.5M DOT is staked, up 38.1M in 90 days, more than half of all DOT. Staked DOT still counts as circulating, so staking takes nothing out of the supply.

Foundation and overhang

The largest pile of DOT that governance can spend is the on-chain Treasury, about 21.46M DOT on Oct 23 2026, down from 24.31M on Jul 25 2026. The second is the protocol pool, about 6.13M DOT, which started the window near 1.66M and now fills by about a third of each day’s new DOT plus fees. Spending from either goes through public OpenGov votes. The Web3 Foundation and Parity also hold DOT, but they publish no wallet list, so we cannot read their balances. Every one of these sits inside the circulating supply, so a payout or a sale books 0 new DOT. We re-read the Treasury and the pool at every rebuild; if either balance falls in a way that moves coins outside the counted supply, the outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh.

How DOT compares to other proof-of-stake Layer 0 and Layer 1 chains

DOT vs ETH: Ethereum pays validators a reward that rises with the stake and burns part of every fee, so its net supply moves with network use. Polkadot fixes the yearly amount in advance and, since March 2026, burns almost nothing, so its net supply hardly moves with use at all. Ethereum has no cap; Polkadot has a hard cap of 2.1B DOT.

DOT vs ATOM and other uncapped staking coins: Cosmos-style chains set inflation as a percent that floats with the staking ratio and have no ceiling. Polkadot’s issuance is a fixed amount of DOT per year that steps down every two years by design, so the percent falls on its own as the supply grows. At today’s supply the 55.93M DOT a year is about 3.3% before any burn, and the next step, around Mar 14 2028, cuts it to about 41.2M a year.

DOT vs BTC: Bitcoin halves its block reward every four years and will stop near 21M coins. Polkadot works on the same idea of a shrinking, capped schedule, but with smaller and more frequent steps: each two-year step takes away 26.28% of what is left to mint, so the 2.1B cap is approached slowly over more than a century. About 391M DOT is still left to mint.

What to watch in the next 90 days

The next runtime upgrade. A change already merged would stop the last blockspace burn and send that revenue and the dust from closed accounts into the protocol pool. It has no enactment date yet; it would remove the last small burn, not add supply.

How the protocol pool is spent. The pool held about 6.13M DOT on Oct 23 2026 and grows by about 49,000 DOT a day. The DOT DAO Strategy Mandate vote that was in progress on Oct 23 2026 will shape what governance does with it.

Treasury payouts. The Treasury fell by about 2.85M DOT in 90 days, including DOT placed into the new DOT and dotUSD pool after the dotUSD vote was enacted on Oct 8 2026. Large new spends move existing DOT, but they decide how much of it reaches the market.

JAM storage sales. If JAM launches and its storage is sold for DOT, the Aug 21 2026 wish says that revenue should be burned. That would be the first new buy-side flow since March 2026. No launch date is set.

Summary

Polkadot is mildly inflationary: 13.78M new DOT in 90 days on a fixed curve, almost nothing burned, and supply up +0.81%, the same projected for the next 90 days. The mint is a fixed 55.93M DOT a year until a step down around Mar 14 2028, inside a hard cap of 2.1B DOT. There are no vesting unlocks, no buyback and, since March 2026, almost no burn, because fees are kept in a protocol pool instead. The key risk is how governance spends the 21.46M DOT Treasury and the fast-growing 6.13M DOT pool; the key limit is the cap.

MrNasDog Pressure Framework analysis of DOT, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Checked Oct 23 2026.

Original: https://mrnasdog.com/research/dot/inflation · Data + explanation only. Not financial advice.