SKY Inflation Analysis · October 2026 · Mixed flows · supply roughly steady

Main page: the full SKY coin page — signal, price drivers and the buy/sell questions → mrnasdog.com/research/sky

SKY supply was roughly steady over the last 90 days and is now set to shrink a little. No new SKY was minted: the Sky treasury paid stakers 183.50M SKY, while the Smart Burn Engine buyback took 94.51M SKY off the market, a net +0.38% of the 23.43B SKY float. A vote on Oct 12 2026 cut the staking stream to 99.52M SKY for the next 90 days, against about 120.81M SKY of buybacks at today’s price, so the next 90 days read −0.09%.

The verdict, in one paragraph

SKY added +0.38% to its circulating supply in the 90 days to Oct 14 2026, and the forward reading is −0.09%. The inflation monitor, which measures the same window from market data, reads +0.39%, a gap of only 0.01 percentage points, well inside the 0.5-point line, so no warning chip is shown. Both numbers sit in the neutral band. SKY is a buyback-funded staking token: the treasury pays stakers with coins the protocol bought back, and burns a slice of every month’s purchases.

Sell pressure: where new SKY comes from

Staking rewards are the only real source of new SKY on the market. No SKY was minted in the window: the token’s total supply fell from 23.463B to 23.452B, and every coin of that fall was a burn. Instead, the Sky treasury, which holds the only SKY that sits outside the counted float, sent 183.50M SKY in 20 weekly payments to the contract that pays people who stake SKY. Once paid, those coins are free to trade, so the whole amount counts as sell pressure.

The pace moved with each monthly vote. Payouts ran at about 22M SKY a week until Aug 17 2026, dropped to about 7.5M a week, rose to about 11M a week after Sep 13 2026, and on Oct 12 2026 a new stream of 99.52M SKY over 90 days began, about 7.7M a week. Since that vote the stream is sized from the coins the buyback actually bought the month before, so the payout now follows the buying rather than a separate budget.

SKY has no team or investor vesting: the only vesting contracts pay staking rewards, and the contract able to create new SKY has no active stream. There is also no foundation sale in the window and no bankruptcy estate or long lock releasing coins. Holders of the old MKR token swapped 6,565 MKR for 150.83M SKY in the window, with a 5% fee held back, but that SKY came from a pool of 2.04B created in advance and already counted as circulating, so the upgrade adds nothing.

Buy pressure: where new SKY goes

The Smart Burn Engine is the one real buyer. Each month, part of Sky’s profit flows into it in small steps, and it swaps USDS for SKY on the open market roughly every 45 minutes. Over the window it made 1,783 swaps, spent 6.43M USDS and bought 94.51M SKY, all sent to the treasury, outside the float. September alone brought 40.55M SKY. The current settings spend about 100,500 USDS a day, which at today’s price buys about 120.81M SKY in the next 90 days.

The split is set by Sky’s treasury rules. Of the money left for holders after reserves, 45% buys SKY that goes back to stakers, 10% buys SKY that is burned, and 45% is paid to stakers in USDS. Two burns followed: 2.86M SKY on Sep 13 2026 and 7.37M SKY on Oct 12 2026. Both came out of the treasury, from coins already taken off the market, so we count them once, as buyback, and the fee burn row stays at zero. There is no foundation buying, and staking is not a lock that leaves the float: 10.22B SKY is staked, up 42.8M in the window, and all of it still counts as circulating.

Foundation and overhang

The Sky treasury is the overhang that matters. It held 21.26M SKY on Oct 14 2026, down from 119.79M at the start of the window, because payouts to stakers ran ahead of buybacks for most of the summer. Its outflows are scheduled (the staking stream) and its inflows come from the buyback, and we read it on-chain every day. The governance contract can still create new SKY by vote, which is why no part of this ledger is marked as fixed for good.

Other large balances sit inside the float and add nothing on their own: the MKR-to-SKY swap pool holds 2.04B SKY for about 83,461 MKR not yet upgraded, including 39.03M SKY of fees kept back, and the Sky Frontier Foundation wallet grew from 1.10M to 37.69M SKY with coins that came from wallets already in the float. If the treasury balance falls outside its scheduled payouts between refreshes, that outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh.

How SKY compares to other buyback DeFi tokens

Most DeFi governance tokens with a buyback either burn what they buy or park it in a treasury. SKY does something in between: it buys back, keeps the coins outside the float for a few weeks, and then pays most of them to stakers. So SKY’s real buyer is smaller than its headline buyback. In the next 90 days the buyback should take about 120.81M SKY off the market while about 99.52M goes back out to stakers, a net shrink of about 21M.

Compared with a token that burns every coin it buys, SKY’s supply shrinks more slowly, because the buyback mostly funds staking rewards. Compared with a chain token that mints new coins for stakers, SKY is in a much better place: it mints nothing, and its staking rewards are paid out of revenue rather than printed. The main difference from a fixed-supply token is the vote: Sky governance can still create SKY, for example to cover a loss, which a token with a hard cap cannot.

What to watch in the next 90 days

Early November 2026: the monthly vote resets the staking stream and the buyback pace from October’s profit, and burns a slice of October’s purchases from the treasury.

Early December 2026 and early January 2027: the same monthly reset; a bigger or smaller profit moves both the buyback and the staking stream.

Sky’s reserve: about $82M against a $150M floor at the last count; half of the profit left after costs is kept back until the floor is reached, and buybacks can grow once it is.

The SKY price: buybacks are set in dollars, so a lower price buys more SKY and a higher price buys fewer, which moves the forward reading.

Summary

SKY is roughly steady by the MrNasDog Pressure Framework: +0.38% net over the last 90 days and about −0.09% over the next 90. No SKY is minted; the Sky treasury pays stakers with coins the Smart Burn Engine buys back with protocol profit, and burns a slice each month. The key risk is a profit drop that slows the buyback while payouts already set keep running, and the fact that governance can still vote new SKY into existence. There is no hard cap, but the treasury now holds only 21.26M SKY, so payouts can no longer run far ahead of the buying.

MrNasDog Pressure Framework analysis of SKY, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Checked Oct 14 2026.

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