Emission Schedule
The published plan for how many new units will be created over time and who receives them.
An emission schedule can live in two very different places. When it is written into consensus rules, as with Bitcoin's halving or a proof-of-stake reward formula that scales with the amount staked, changing it requires the whole network to adopt new software. When it lives in a distribution contract, such as a liquidity mining program paying a fixed number of tokens per block, a governance vote or an admin key can raise, lower, or end it. Schedules are usually drawn as a cumulative supply curve, and the slope of that curve is what determines the inflation rate at any date. Comparing two assets means checking not only the shape of the curve but who is empowered to redraw it.
In practice
Bitcoin's schedule is enforced by consensus, so the halving happens at a fixed block height whether or not anyone wants it to.
The common misunderstanding
A published emission schedule is a plan rather than a promise: unless consensus rules enforce it, governance or an administrator can change it.
The figure this maps to
How many new tokens the protocol creates each day, before any are destroyed.
Limits: Providers differ on whether vesting releases count as issuance: those tokens already exist and are simply becoming transferable, so a source that includes them measures something different from one that counts only protocol-level minting. On proof-of-stake chains the reward rate varies with how…