Originally published at https://mrnasdog.com/research/ada/inflation

ADA Inflation Analysis · August 2026 · Supply growing, projected to keep growing

Over the last 90 days about 365.9M ADA reached the tradable float on Cardano — 115.7M released from the protocol reserve and a larger 269.6M paid out of the on-chain Cardano treasury by voted governance actions, against just 19.3M donated back. The MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads ADA at +0.98% net for the window and +0.77% forward; our independent supply monitor reads +1.02%, a gap of 0.04 percentage points. Cardano is hard-capped at 45 billion ADA and mints nothing above it — but the cap is a ceiling, not a brake, and the treasury has become the bigger of the two taps.

The verdict, in one paragraph

For the 90-day window ending Aug 2 2026, the Pressure Framework reads Cardano at +0.98% net on the last-90-day view and +0.77% on the forward view. Our supply monitor independently reads the realised change at +1.02%, putting the gap at 0.04 percentage points — comfortably inside tolerance, so there is no monitor-gap flag on this build. The two readings agree because both measure the same quantity from opposite ends: the framework adds up the on-chain flows into the float, and the monitor measures the float itself. Total sell pressure was 385.3M ADA against 19.3M of buy pressure. The label that fits Cardano is structurally inflationary on a hard cap — the 45 billion ADA ceiling is real and permanent, but a large reserve and a large treasury still sit outside the float, and both are draining into it.

Sell pressure: where new ADA comes from

Sell #1, protocol inflation, contributed 115.7M ADA over the window. This row needs care, because Cardano never mints ADA above its 45 billion cap. Instead, new supply is released from a protocol reserve set aside at genesis. Every five-day epoch the protocol moves a fixed fraction — rho, about 0.3% — of whatever remains in the reserve into a reward pot; tau, 20% of that pot, is routed to the Cardano treasury and the balance is paid out as staking rewards to stake pools and delegators. Measured directly on-chain, the reserve fell from 6,389.9M to 6,206.3M ADA across the window, a drawdown of 183.7M. But only part of that reaches the market: 68.0M was absorbed by the treasury, which sits outside the circulating float, leaving 115.7M of genuinely new tradable ADA. This distinction matters — modelling the reserve release from the formula alone, rather than reading the reserve balance, overstates Cardano's emission substantially, because unspent reward capacity is returned to the reserve each epoch. Because the release is a fixed share of a shrinking reserve, ADA emission is disinflationary by construction and decays every epoch.

Sell #2, vesting unlocks, is zero, and structurally so. Cardano has no live vesting contract and no unlock calendar — the 2017 distribution and the founding-organisation allocations finished releasing years ago, so there is no cliff inside the window or beyond it. Sell #3, foundation and unscheduled unlocks, is the largest row on the page at 269.6M ADA, and it is the reason this build differs from a naive reading of Cardano. The Cardano treasury is a real, on-chain, governance-controlled pot, and under the 2026 ecosystem budget it has been spending steadily: 24 treasury-withdrawal governance actions were enacted inside the window, moving 269.6M ADA out of the treasury and into circulation — the largest a single 131.5M budget batch. That is well over twice the reserve's contribution. Sell #4, long-term locked or bankruptcy, is zero — there is no bankruptcy estate, no trustee distribution and no locked tranche attached to ADA.

Buy pressure: where new ADA goes

Cardano's buy side is close to empty, and that is a structural fact rather than a temporary lull. Buy #1, programmatic buyback, is zero: Cardano runs no buyback contract. A 2026 funding model has been publicly floated that would recycle a share of grant capital and convert part of the treasury into Bitcoin and stablecoins to fund open-market ADA purchases, but nothing is deployed and no purchase has been observed on-chain, so the framework books nothing — a proposal is capacity, not cadence. Buy #2, protocol fee burn, is zero and this is the single most important structural point about Cardano's supply: Cardano does not burn transaction fees. Fees are pooled each epoch and recycled into the reward pot and the treasury rather than destroyed, so however busy the network gets, fee activity removes no ADA from supply. A burn feature is in development but is not live.

Buy #3, foundation buy, is zero — no foundation or ecosystem entity has disclosed an executed open-market ADA purchase programme and no accumulation wallet has been identified. Buy #4, new long-term lock, is also zero, and for a reason unique to Cardano's staking design: delegation is non-custodial and non-locking. Delegated ADA never leaves the holder's own wallet, has no bonding period and no slashing, so even very high staking participation removes nothing from the tradable float — unlike bonded proof-of-stake chains where staked supply is genuinely illiquid. The one real offset is a fifth row the framework adds outside the canonical four: treasury donations, worth 19.3M ADA. ADA can be sent back into the on-chain treasury, which removes it from the float; the figure is most plausibly undrawn budget being handed back. It is sporadic, with no schedule, so the forward view books nothing for it.

Foundation and overhang

Cardano has exactly one team-controlled overhang worth tracking, and it is unusually transparent: the on-chain Cardano treasury, which held 1,446.4M ADA at the close of the window. It is not a multisig or a custodial wallet but a protocol-level pot, funded automatically by the 20% treasury share of each epoch's reward pot and spendable only through a ratified treasury-withdrawal governance action. That makes every disbursement dated, quantified and readable on-chain — the cleanest overhang in the framework's coverage, refreshed by a direct chain read on every rebuild. The overhang is actively draining: its balance fell from 1,628.7M to 1,446.4M ADA across the window even while receiving 68.0M of fresh reserve inflow, and a live pipeline worth about 124.1M ADA — dominated by one 120M open-market action — is on-chain awaiting votes. Governance also sets a Net Change Limit, a per-cycle ceiling on treasury withdrawals, which bounds the damage but does not schedule it. If the Cardano treasury's balance falls further between refreshes, that outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh.

How ADA compares to other capped proof-of-stake chains

Cardano sits in an unusual structural spot. Against halving-model chains with hard caps such as Bitcoin, ADA shares the fixed 45 billion ceiling and the decaying issuance curve, but the resemblance stops there. Bitcoin's subsidy steps down on a block schedule that no vote can alter; Cardano's reserve release decays smoothly, and a governance parameter change could in principle adjust rho or tau. More importantly, Bitcoin has no treasury — every coin ever issued goes straight to miners and into the float. Cardano routes a fifth of its emission into a governance-controlled pot that can later be spent into the market, which means Cardano has a second, discretionary emission channel that a pure halving chain simply does not have. On this build that second channel was the larger of the two.

Against uncapped continuous-emission proof-of-stake L1s such as Solana or Ethereum, ADA looks better on the ceiling and worse on the offset. Cardano cannot inflate past 45 billion no matter what happens, which is a genuine long-run guarantee neither of those chains offers. But Ethereum burns its base fee, so heavy usage can push net supply negative, and Solana burns half of every transaction fee. Cardano burns nothing at all — fees are recycled, not destroyed — so there is no usage-linked mechanism that can offset issuance. Cardano also lacks the bonded-staking lockup that removes float on those chains; ADA delegation stays liquid. The practical result: Cardano's supply growth is low, predictable and one-directional. It cannot spike, but it also cannot go negative. Compared with exchange tokens running quarterly buybacks and burns, which can post genuinely deflationary quarters, Cardano offers a capped ceiling in place of active supply removal — scarcity by arithmetic rather than by demand.

What to watch in the next 90 days

First, the live treasury-withdrawal governance actions worth about 124.1M ADA, chief among them a 120M AlphaGrowth action that resolves by Aug 12 2026 — this is the single biggest swing factor in the forward reading, and the framework projects 175M of treasury spend over the next 90 days from the observed post-batch cadence rather than the full requested pipeline or the budget ceiling. Second, the Net Change Limit for the budget cycle: any governance move to lift that ceiling would raise the upper bound on Sell #3. Third, any parameter-change action touching rho or tau, which would re-rate Sell #1 directly by altering how fast the reserve drains and how much of it the treasury keeps. Fourth, the proposed 2026 funding model — if capital recycling and the treasury-to-Bitcoin conversion that funds open-market ADA purchases is actually ratified and a contract is deployed, Buy #1 goes non-zero for the first time in Cardano's history. Fifth, the burn feature currently in development: a live fee burn would be the first genuine supply-removal mechanism on the chain and would change the shape of this page.

Summary

The MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads Cardano at +0.98% net supply growth over the last 90 days and +0.77% projected forward — supply growing, and projected to keep growing. The structural mechanism is a hard-capped 45 billion ADA supply released from a shrinking protocol reserve, which guarantees the emission rate decays but guarantees nothing about the second tap: the on-chain Cardano treasury, which spent 269.6M ADA into circulation this window and outweighed the reserve more than two to one. The key risk is that this treasury channel is discretionary and vote-driven rather than mechanical, with 1,446.4M ADA still held — so the pace can change quickly without any change to the protocol. The ceiling is the real guarantee: Cardano cannot exceed 45 billion ADA, it has no burn and no buyback to fall below its current supply, and it therefore offers a bounded, slowly-decaying, one-directional supply curve.

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MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of ADA, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated Aug 3 2026.