Maximum Supply

Some protocols encode a hard ceiling on issuance. Bitcoin is the best-known case: the block subsidy halves every 210,000 blocks, so total issuance converges to a finite number and the last fraction of a coin is scheduled to be issued around the year 2140. Many other assets have no ceiling at all, because their issuance is a perpetual reward to validators or an open-ended governance decision. Where no ceiling exists, this field is empty rather than filled with a placeholder.

Où cela induit en erreur

A maximum is only real if the code enforces it and the code cannot easily be changed; many published maximums come from a whitepaper or token-sale document and could be revised by a governance vote or a protocol upgrade. Assets with genuinely unbounded issuance, including Ethereum after its 2022 transition to proof-of-stake and most inflationary proof-of-stake chains, have no maximum, and any fully diluted valuation built on them substitutes a different quantity without saying so. A token whose mint authority has never been revoked has no enforceable maximum regardless of what is published. The figure says nothing about the pace of issuance: two assets with identical maximums can reach them centuries apart.

La comparaison avec les actions, et pourquoi elle ne tient pas

Authorized share capital. The analogy fails because authorized capital is set in a corporate charter enforceable in court and changed only by a shareholder vote on record, whereas a maximum supply is enforced by code and by whoever holds the ability to change that code.

Interpréter une valeur haute ou basse

A stated maximum indicates the ceiling issuance converges toward under current rules; an empty field means no ceiling is encoded. The presence of a maximum describes the issuance rule, not the rate at which tokens arrive.