Inflation Rate (Token Supply)
How fast a digital asset's supply is growing, expressed as a yearly percentage of the supply that already exists.
The calculation is new units created over a period divided by the supply at the start of that period, then annualized. The word is borrowed from economics but measures something different: it describes the growth of one asset's unit count, not a rise in the general price level of goods and services, and it says nothing about purchasing power. On networks that destroy units, the figure is normally quoted both gross and net of burns, and the net figure can be negative. Comparisons only hold when the same supply base is used, since a rate computed on circulating supply is larger than the same issuance measured against total supply.
In practice
A network issuing new units to validators while burning transaction fees will show a gross supply growth rate above zero and a net rate that moves with network activity.
The common misunderstanding
Token supply growth is not consumer-price inflation; it says units are being created and nothing about what those units buy.
The figure this maps to
How fast the token supply is growing per year, before any burns are subtracted.
Limits: It is routinely confused with price inflation, which it is not; a network can have high supply growth and rising prices at the same time, or the reverse. The denominator is the provider's circulating-supply estimate, so a reclassification of locked tokens moves the reported rate with no change in…