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

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Stellar (XLM) mints no new coins, yet its circulating supply grew +2.94% in the 90 days to Oct 22 2026, and we project the same +2.94% for the next 90. All of that growth comes from one place: the Stellar Development Foundation, which paid a net 1.035B XLM out of its accounts and still holds 14.52B XLM. The only thing taking XLM off the market is the network fee pool, which kept 678,067 XLM in the same window. Total supply is fixed at about 50.0B XLM, so the ceiling on future growth is the Foundation’s own balance.

The verdict, in one paragraph

Over the last 90 days, from Jul 24 to Oct 22 2026, XLM’s circulating supply rose by a net +2.94%: about 1.035B XLM entered the market from the Foundation and about 678K XLM left it through fees. Market-data trackers show +3.08% for the same window, just 0.14 points from our figure, so the two readings agree and no warning flag is shown. The next 90 days look the same: +2.94%, because the Foundation pays out XLM every week and nothing in the protocol is set to change that. XLM is a fixed-supply coin with a foundation-driven float: the coin count never moves, but the part of it that can trade keeps growing as the Foundation spends.

Sell pressure: where new XLM comes from

Protocol inflation is 0. Stellar once added 1% a year to supply, but validators voted to switch that off in October 2019, after it had created 5,443,902,087 XLM. The network’s coin count read exactly 105,443,902,087 XLM at both ends of this window. It could only change if validators approved a new rule, and nothing like that is proposed.

Vesting unlocks are 0. XLM has no vesting calendar. The Foundation used time-locked escrows in the past, but they were emptied years ago and hold about 2 XLM each today.

Foundation releases are 1.035B XLM, the whole sell side. The Stellar Development Foundation keeps its XLM in 15 known accounts grouped into four funds: Direct Development, Growth, Product and Innovation, and Assets and Liquidity. Coins in those accounts do not count as circulating; once they leave, they do. Between Jul 24 and Oct 22 2026 the accounts sent 1.108B XLM to 579 outside accounts and received 72.5M XLM back, a net release of 1,035,164,130 XLM, or about 11.5M XLM a day. At $0.175 that is roughly $181M of new XLM for buyers to absorb in one quarter. Large transfers between the Foundation’s own accounts, such as 800M XLM on Aug 7 2026 and about 707M XLM moved into the Development accounts on Oct 1 and Oct 7 2026, stay inside its holdings and add nothing.

The pace is rising. The Foundation held about 17.03B XLM on Feb 9 2026, 16.00B on Jun 7, 15.56B on Jul 24 and 14.52B on Oct 22. That is about 8.7M XLM a day from February to June and 11.5M a day in the last 90 days. There is no published schedule, but payouts happen every week, so we expect the next 90 days to look like the last 90.

Long-term locked or bankruptcy releases are 0. No court case or bankruptcy estate holds XLM. A separate network upgrade reserve of 258.9M XLM is kept outside both the market and the Foundation’s funds, and it did not move in this window.

Buy pressure: where new XLM goes

Programmatic buyback is 0. Neither the Stellar network nor the Foundation buys XLM back.

Protocol fee burn is 0. Stellar does not destroy fees. The burn account that received 55.44B XLM when the Foundation cut total supply roughly in half in November 2019 still exists, and people sometimes send it small amounts, but in these 90 days it gained only about 2.5 XLM.

Foundation buy is 0. The Foundation spends and gives away XLM; it does not buy. The 72.5M XLM that came back to its accounts is already netted inside the 1.035B release.

New long-term lock is 0. Stellar has no staking, so no XLM gets locked to secure the network.

Fees held in the fee pool: 678,067 XLM. Every Stellar transaction fee goes into a network fee pool. Since inflation ended, no rule pays that pool out, so fees leave the market for as long as the rules stay as they are. The pool grew from 10.23M to 10.91M XLM in the window, about 7,500 XLM a day, and the three 30-day slices were steady at about 200K, 238K and 240K XLM. Fees on Stellar are tiny by design, so this buy-side flow offsets less than 0.1% of what the Foundation releases.

Foundation and overhang

The Foundation’s balance is the overhang. On Oct 22 2026 the 15 accounts held 14.52B XLM: about 2.60B in Direct Development, 5.24B in Growth, 3.40B in Product and Innovation and 3.29B in Assets and Liquidity. The Foundation says Direct Development coins are sold on exchanges and through direct sales to pay its running costs, while the Growth funds pay for events, grants and its community fund. It has also said it is updating how these funds are split. Together the funds equal about 29% of all XLM that exists, and at today’s pace they would last about three and a half more years.

Two smaller piles sit outside the market too: the 258.9M XLM network upgrade reserve and the 10.91M XLM fee pool. We read all of these balances on-chain at every rebuild. If any of them falls between rebuilds, the outflow enters the Foundation release line at the next one.

How XLM compares to other payment-focused Layer 1 chains

XLM and XRP are the closest pair. Both have a fixed coin count and no mining or staking rewards, and in both the organisation behind the chain holds a large share of supply. The difference is how that share reaches the market. Ripple’s XRP sits in on-chain escrows that open on a set monthly calendar, so its releases are dated in advance. The Stellar Development Foundation has no such calendar: it spends from its accounts as it sees fit, which is why XLM’s supply growth has to be measured from the chain every time rather than read from a schedule. The XRP Ledger also destroys every fee, while Stellar keeps fees in a pool; at both chains’ tiny fees neither removes much.

Against staking chains such as Ethereum, Solana or Cardano, XLM’s growth has a different source. Those networks pay validators in new coins, so their supply grows forever at a rate set by code. XLM has no such issuance, so once the Foundation’s 14.52B XLM is spent, circulating supply stops growing at about 50.0B. Hedera (HBAR) is the nearer match on that point: its supply is also fixed and its float grows as a treasury releases coins.

At +2.94% a quarter, XLM sits among the faster-growing large coins by circulating supply, even though it creates nothing new. That is the main thing to know about Stellar’s supply: the risk is spending, not printing.

What to watch in the next 90 days

Nov 3 2026: the Bell upgrade (protocol 30) goes to a test-network vote. It adds post-quantum signature checks for smart contracts, sub-accounts for contract addresses and millisecond ledger times; nothing in it changes fees, the fee pool or supply.

Nov 23 2026: validators vote on Bell for the main network. A passed vote does not change this reading.

Early November 2026: the Foundation’s third-quarter report, which usually includes how many XLM it spent and on what. A sharp change from 11.5M XLM a day would move our next-90-day figure.

The Development accounts: about 707M XLM was moved into them in early October 2026. These are the accounts the Foundation sells from, so how fast that pile shrinks is the best early sign of the next quarter’s release.

Summary

Stellar (XLM) creates no new coins, burns nothing and has no staking, yet its circulating supply grew +2.94% in the 90 days to Oct 22 2026 because the Stellar Development Foundation released a net 1.035B XLM from its accounts. The fee pool took back only 678K XLM, and we expect the same +2.94% in the next 90 days. The key risk is the Foundation’s remaining 14.52B XLM, which has no release calendar and has been spent faster this year. The ceiling is hard: total supply is fixed at about 50.0B XLM, so growth ends when the Foundation’s balance runs out.

MrNasDog Pressure Framework analysis of XLM, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Checked Oct 22 2026.

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