Total Supply
Every unit of an asset that exists on-chain right now, including locked units, minus any that have been permanently destroyed.
For a token, total supply is usually readable directly from the contract, which is why it is the least disputed of the three supply figures. It includes units nobody can trade yet, such as team allocations under vesting, treasury reserves, and unclaimed airdrops, and it excludes units sent to a burn address or removed by a burn function. It differs from circulating supply, which strips out what is not in public hands, and from maximum supply, which describes what may ever exist. Assets that live on several chains complicate the figure, because a bridged or wrapped representation can be counted alongside the units locked to back it.
In practice
A token contract that has minted its whole allocation at launch shows a total supply that stays flat while circulating supply rises with each unlock.
The common misunderstanding
Total supply is not a cap: for most tokens the contract can mint further units if an owner or a governance vote decides to.
The figure this maps to
Every token that currently exists, including locked ones, minus tokens verifiably destroyed.
Limits: Providers differ on what counts as destroyed: tokens sent to an address with no known private key, tokens stranded in a contract with no withdrawal function, and tokens locked by a bridge on another chain are each subtracted by some sources and counted by others. On a chain with continuous…