Token Issuance
The creation of new units of an asset, either by a blockchain's own rules or by a contract that mints tokens.
Protocol issuance is payment for security: proof-of-work chains pay a block subsidy to miners, and proof-of-stake chains pay newly created units to validators for proposing and attesting to blocks. Contract issuance is payment for growth or for people: liquidity mining programs mint tokens to depositors, and team or investor allocations are often minted on a schedule. Issuance is a gross figure, so on chains that also destroy units it must be compared with burns to see whether supply actually grew. Readers meet it as an annualized rate, as units per block or per epoch, and as the emissions column in a tokenomics table.
En pratique
On a proof-of-stake network, the units paid to validators for attesting to blocks are issuance, funded by expanding supply rather than by a customer paying a bill.
Le malentendu courant
Issuance is not free funding for a protocol: every new unit reduces the share of supply held by everyone who did not receive it.
Le chiffre auquel cela correspond
How many new tokens the protocol creates each day, before any are destroyed.
Limites: 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…