Originally published at https://mrnasdog.com/research/xmr/inflation
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XMR Inflation Analysis · October 2026 · Mixed flows · supply roughly steady
Monero (XMR) is mildly inflationary by design, at a steady and predictable pace. Between Jul 23 and Oct 21 2026 Monero miners received 38,818 new XMR, and nothing was burned, bought back or locked, so XMR supply grew +0.21% in 90 days, with the same +0.21% expected over the next 90 days. Monero has no premine, no vesting and no team treasury; its only new supply is a fixed 0.6 XMR tail emission per block that never ends, about 0.84% a year today and a little less every year as the supply grows.
The verdict, in one paragraph
We put Monero’s net supply change at +0.21% over the last 90 days and +0.21% over the next 90 days. Other supply trackers show +0.21% for the same period, a difference of about 0.004 percentage points, so there is no data conflict to flag and no warning on the page. The sell side is 38,818 XMR of mining reward on a circulating supply of 18.82M XMR; the buy side is zero. In one line: XMR is a quiet tail-emission chain, with a small, fixed and fully public flow of new coins to miners and nothing else.
Sell pressure: where new XMR comes from
Protocol inflation is the only live row. Since its main emission curve ran out in 2022, Monero pays every block a fixed tail emission of 0.6 XMR. Between Jul 23 and Oct 21 2026 the Monero chain added 64,699 blocks, slightly fewer than the 64,800 its two-minute target would give, so miners received 38,818 XMR, about 431 XMR a day. Monero trims the reward of an unusually heavy block, and 4,919 such blocks in the window held back just 1.2 XMR that was never created. Miners usually sell a large share of this reward to pay for power and hardware.
Vesting unlocks are 0. Monero launched in April 2014 as a fair launch, with no premine and no allocation for founders, a company or investors, so there is no unlock calendar at all. Every XMR in existence was mined.
Foundation and unscheduled unlocks are 0. Monero has no foundation treasury. Its developers are paid from a community donation fund, and that fund’s balance is private like every other Monero balance. Whatever it holds already counts as circulating, so a payout from it moves existing coins and adds no new XMR.
Long-term locked or bankruptcy supply is 0. No exchange estate, court or trustee holds a pile of XMR waiting to be released, and every XMR already counts as circulating.
Buy pressure: where new XMR goes
Programmatic buyback is 0. No contract, company or treasury buys XMR back for the Monero network, and the protocol has no revenue that could fund one.
Protocol fee burn is 0. Unlike chains with a base-fee burn, Monero sends every transaction fee to the miner who finds the block. Fees came to about 678 XMR in these 90 days across roughly 2.5 million transactions, and all of it stayed in the supply.
Foundation buy is 0. There is no foundation or team buying. Traders, swap services and people who use Monero for private payments buy coins that already circulate, which takes nothing out of the count.
New long-term lock is 0. Monero is a proof-of-work chain, so there is no staking and no lock that pulls XMR out of the float. The total buy side is therefore 0 XMR, and the whole 38,818 XMR of mining reward is the net change.
Foundation and overhang
Monero has almost no overhang in the usual sense. There is no team wallet, no investor unlock and no reserve outside the circulating count: all 18.82M XMR that exist are counted as circulating and unlocked. The one group-controlled pool is the community donation fund that pays developers for approved work. Its balance cannot be read on-chain because Monero hides amounts, so we follow it through the project’s own funding pages. Because it already sits inside the circulating supply, its spending does not change our numbers. If that picture ever changes, for example if a large pool of XMR were shown to sit outside the circulating count and began to flow out, that outflow would enter the foundation and unscheduled unlocks row at the next refresh.
How XMR compares to other proof-of-work and privacy coins
Against hard-capped proof-of-work coins, Monero chose the opposite trade. Bitcoin and Zcash both halve their block reward on a fixed schedule toward a 21 million cap, so their new supply keeps shrinking and miners will one day live on fees alone. Monero stopped its declining curve in 2022 and switched to a flat 0.6 XMR per block forever. That means XMR has no supply cap, but its yearly inflation still falls slowly, because a fixed number of new coins becomes a smaller share of a growing supply. At about 0.84% a year today, Monero’s issuance rate is already in the range a halving coin reaches only after several halvings.
Against other uncapped coins, Monero is on the light side. Dogecoin also pays a fixed reward forever, 10,000 DOGE a block, but on one-minute blocks that is a much larger share of its supply each year. Proof-of-stake chains such as Ethereum pay validators new coins and burn part of their fees; Monero burns nothing, so its net and gross issuance are the same number.
Among privacy coins, the main difference is who gets the new coins. In Monero 100% of the block reward goes to miners: there is no developer fund cut, no treasury share and no lockbox. That keeps the supply story very simple: a known amount of new XMR every block, and no unlock or treasury decision that can change it.
What to watch in the next 90 days
The FCMP++ upgrade, Monero’s biggest privacy change in years, has no main-network date. Its test network forked on Oct 5 2026, and a non-binding developer plan points to around April 2027, after this window. As planned it changes how transactions hide their sender, not the 0.6 XMR reward.
The block pace. The window ran at about 719 blocks a day against a target of 720. A sustained change in pace moves the real issuance slightly, and we check it again at each review.
Mining security. A large mining pool briefly claimed a majority of Monero’s mining power in 2025, and developers have since discussed changes to the mining rules. A change there could alter how blocks are made, but no proposal on the table changes the reward.
Software releases. Monero 0.18.5.4 shipped on Oct 16 2026 as a small bug-fix release with no change to the rules. Any release that schedules a hard fork will be the first sign of a rule change.
Exchange access. From Jul 10 2027, regulated crypto firms in the European Union may no longer handle privacy coins such as XMR. That affects who can buy XMR, not how many XMR exist.
Summary
Monero (XMR) grows its supply by a fixed 0.6 XMR per block forever, which came to 38,818 new XMR, or +0.21%, between Jul 23 and Oct 21 2026, with the same +0.21% expected over the next 90 days. Nothing is burned, bought back, staked or locked, and there is no premine, vesting or team treasury, so mining reward is the whole story. The main risk on the supply side is low: the reward is set in the protocol and the next upgrade does not touch it. XMR has no cap, but its yearly inflation, about 0.84% today, keeps edging down as the supply grows.
MrNasDog Pressure Framework analysis of XMR, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Checked Oct 21 2026.
Original: https://mrnasdog.com/research/xmr/inflation · Data + explanation only. Not financial advice.