Validators process transactions and receive fees from users (supply-side fees).

Cardano is a smart contract platform for decentralized applications (a blockchain). Cardano was founded by Charles Hoskinson & Jeremy Wood and launched in 2017.

ADA holders own and govern the protocol. They currently do not take a cut of the total transaction fees paid by users (revenue).

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Cardano

# Cardano Maximum token supply Methodology

## 1. Overview

Maximum token supply measures the total number of assets that can ever exist under the current token economics of Cardano. This includes assets that are circulating, locked, unvested, or reserved for future issuance. For Cardano, this metric represents the absolute hard cap of 45 billion ADA established by the protocol's monetary policy.

## 2. Data sources

- **None**: This metric is set to a constant value and does not consume blockchain events

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Fixed supply assignment

- **Purpose**: Define the absolute limit for the Cardano asset
- **Logic**: A constant value of 45,000,000,000 is assigned to represent the total maximum supply of ADA. This value reflects the protocol-level hard cap programmed into the Cardano economic model.
- **Key fields**: `token_supply_maximum`

### Component B: Temporal normalization and forward-filling

- **Purpose**: Ensure the metric is consistently reported across the project's history
- **Logic**: The fixed supply value is indexed to the project launch date of October 18, 2017. Amounts are normalized by decimal precision. A fill-forward strategy is applied to populate all daily intervals from the launch date to the present, ensuring the maximum supply is represented as a constant value over time.
- **Key fields**: `timestamp`, `fill_strategy`

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Maximum number of tokens that can exist under the current token economics.

CardanoADA

Maximum token supply

Maximum token supply

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