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

ADA Inflation Analysis · August 2026 · Supply was growing, trend cooling

Over the last 90 days about 352.9M ADA reached the tradable float on Cardano — 114.4M released from the Cardano protocol reserve and a larger 258.0M voted out of the on-chain Cardano treasury, against only 19.6M handed back. The MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads ADA at +0.94% net for the window and +0.31% forward; our independent supply monitor reads +0.98%, 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 Cardano treasury, not the reserve, is still the bigger of Cardano's two taps.

The verdict, in one paragraph

For the 90-day window ending Aug 27 2026, the Pressure Framework reads Cardano at +0.94% net new supply — total sell pressure of 372.4M ADA against buy pressure of 19.6M ADA, divided by a circulating supply of 37,498.6M ADA. Our independent supply monitor reads +0.98% for the same window, a gap of only 0.04 percentage points — comfortably inside tolerance, so no data-conflict flag is raised on the ADA overview. The two readings agree because they measure the same quantity from opposite ends: the framework sums the on-chain flows into the float, while the monitor measures the float itself. That agreement is what lets the forward call carry weight. Looking ahead the framework reads +0.31%, and the reason is not the reserve — it is that Cardano governance has almost nothing left it is allowed to spend. ADA in August 2026 is a capped chain with a discretionary tap: the protocol half of its inflation decays on schedule, and the governance half is the whole story.

Sell pressure: where new ADA comes from

Cardano's protocol inflation contributed 114.4M ADA over the window. Cardano never mints above its 45 billion cap. Instead new ADA is released from a protocol reserve: every five-day epoch a fixed fraction of what is left in that reserve moves into a reward pot, one fifth of the pot is taken by the on-chain Cardano treasury, and the rest is paid to stake pools and delegators. Read directly on-chain at both ends of the window, the reserve fell from 6,338.2M ADA to 6,156.6M ADA across exactly 18 epochs — a release of 181.6M, of which 67.2M never reached the market because the Cardano treasury absorbed it. Only the remaining 114.4M is real sell pressure, and an independent read of the staking rewards actually distributed epoch by epoch lands within 0.6% of the same figure. Because the slice is taken from what is left, the decay is geometric — a measured 0.161% of the remaining reserve per epoch — so Cardano's protocol emission shrinks every single epoch without needing a halving.

Vesting unlocks contributed zero. Cardano has no vesting cliff left to unlock: the public sale and the three founding-organisation allocations finished releasing in 2019, so there is no schedule, no cliff and no locked tranche pending. This is one of the few large-cap tokens where the unlock question is genuinely closed.

The Foundation and unscheduled-unlock row is where Cardano's real inflation lives: 258.0M ADA, from 20 treasury withdrawal governance actions enacted on-chain inside the window. One dominates — the 120.0M ADA "Cardano PRIME" open-market liquidity withdrawal, ratified in August and enacted at the epoch boundary on Aug 17 2026. That one is worth stating plainly: it is realised, not pending. The Cardano treasury balance fell by 116.4M ADA net at that boundary, and the ADA is now inside the circulating float — even though 131.8M ADA sits today in a single readable administrator account behind staged release gates rather than on an order book. The framework books ADA when it leaves the non-circulating Cardano treasury, not when someone sells it.

Long-term locked or bankruptcy supply contributed zero. No bankruptcy estate, trustee or court-supervised distribution releases ADA on a schedule, so there is nothing arriving from that side and nothing to watch.

Buy pressure: where new ADA goes

There is no programmatic buyback on Cardano — zero. No protocol contract buys ADA, and no treasury-funded buyback has been deployed or voted on-chain, so the row scores nothing.

Protocol fee burn is also zero, and this is structural rather than incidental. Cardano has no burn address and no destroy step: there is simply no mechanism in the ledger that removes ADA from existence. Every transaction fee is pooled at the end of the epoch and recycled — one fifth to the on-chain Cardano treasury, the rest to stakers. Both surfaces were checked at both ends of the window and both point the same way: ledger supply rose from 38,661.8M to 38,843.4M ADA, and there is no dead-address balance to rise. Where an Ethereum-style base-fee burn turns network usage into supply reduction, Cardano turns network usage into staking yield. Usage on Cardano can rise without the supply curve bending at all, and that is the single biggest structural difference between ADA and the burn-model chains it is compared to.

Foundation buying is zero, and the disclosed direction of travel is the other way: the Cardano Foundation's latest published accounts cut ADA to roughly half of its balance sheet from about three quarters a year earlier, while bitcoin and cash took a larger share. No open-market ADA purchase is disclosed anywhere.

New long-term locks are zero as well, and the reason is important. Cardano staking is a pointer, not a lock: delegated ADA never leaves the owner's wallet and can be spent at any time, so a large headline staking ratio removes nothing from tradable float. The only ADA genuinely immobilised by the Cardano protocol is a set of refundable governance and stake deposits worth about 0.01% of supply — and that figure fell slightly over the window. The one genuine offset is a fifth row: 19.6M ADA donated back into the on-chain Cardano treasury, almost all of it credited in a single step on Jul 3 2026. That ADA does leave circulation — but a future spending vote can release it again.

Foundation and overhang

Three identified overhangs sit behind ADA. The first is the on-chain Cardano treasury, which still held 1,344.9M ADA at the close of the window. It is not a multisig or a custodial wallet but a protocol-level pot, readable directly on-chain and refreshed on every rebuild, and it has no fixed release schedule — every ADA leaving it does so by governance vote. The second is the administrator account now holding 131.8M ADA of already-withdrawn programme funding, readable on-chain to the lovelace and gated in stages rather than deployed. The third is the Cardano Foundation's own reserves, tracked through its published annual accounts rather than on-chain because no per-address disclosure exists. It is worth being precise about why the Foundation's ADA scores zero rather than a sale estimate: those coins are already inside the circulating float, so a Foundation disposal moves price, not supply. The Cardano treasury and the Cardano protocol reserve are different — both sit outside circulating supply, which is exactly why their outflows are booked as new float.

What is deliberately not listed as an overhang is the 6,156.6M ADA protocol reserve itself. It is not team-controlled: no entity can accelerate it, it is released mechanically by the consensus rules, and it is already booked continuously in the protocol inflation row. There is no unscheduled-unlock pool, no buyback accumulation wallet and no bankruptcy-estate residual. If the Cardano treasury balance, the administrator account, or the Foundation's disclosed ADA holding falls between refreshes, that outflow enters the Foundation and unscheduled-unlock row at the next refresh.

How ADA compares to other proof-of-stake layer-1 chains

Against uncapped proof-of-stake layer-1s, Cardano's protocol half looks good and its governance half looks unusual. Chains like Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche mint new units against no ceiling; Cardano cannot exceed 45 billion ADA, and its reserve release is a fraction of a shrinking pool, so the protocol tap approaches zero without any scheduled event. That is a genuinely stronger cap story than most of its peers can tell. But Cardano is also one of the very few large chains where a second, discretionary tap sits alongside the protocol one: a treasury that voters can open. Over this window that treasury released more than twice what the Cardano protocol did.

Against the burn-model chains the contrast is sharper still. Ethereum burns its base fee, so usage removes supply; BNB runs a quarterly programmatic burn; several exchange tokens buy back and destroy. Cardano has neither burn nor buyback, and it cannot acquire one without a protocol change, because fees are recycled to stakers and the Cardano treasury by design. ADA therefore has no mechanism at all that can turn a busy quarter into a shrinking supply — the best case for ADA is a supply that stops growing, not one that shrinks. Against halving-model chains with hard caps such as Bitcoin and Litecoin, Cardano shares the cap and the decaying issuance but adds the treasury, which is the part a halving chain simply does not have. The right mental model for ADA is a capped chain with a parliament: the issuance curve is predictable and the spending curve is a vote.

What to watch in the next 90 days

The single biggest item is Sep 1 2026, when five of Cardano's eight constitutional-committee entries expire. That would leave three against a protocol minimum of five, and below the minimum no treasury withdrawal, protocol-parameter change or hard fork can be ratified until seats are refilled. The on-chain renewal action stood at 66.1% of DRep stake and 36.7% of pool stake at the close of the window, against bars of 67% and 51% — so the base case is that Cardano treasury spending pauses. Second, the two remaining live spending votes, together worth 4.3M ADA, close on Sep 16 2026; they are the entire live queue. Third, the spending ceiling itself: voters raised it from 350M to 500M ADA for the current period on Aug 2 2026, and cumulative approved withdrawals since February now stand at 457.4M — leaving only 42.6M ADA of headroom all the way out to Jul 3 2027. Another ceiling vote is the one event that could reopen the tap. Fourth, the Cardano protocol reserve keeps draining regardless of governance, and a rebuild should re-read it every cycle. Fifth, the Cardano Foundation publishes its accounts annually in the spring; a materially smaller ADA holding there is the trigger to revisit the Foundation row.

Summary

Cardano added about +0.94% to its ADA float over the 90 days to Aug 27 2026, and roughly two thirds of that came from governance rather than from the Cardano protocol: 258.0M ADA of enacted treasury withdrawals against 114.4M of reserve release, offset only by 19.6M returned to the treasury. Our independent monitor reads +0.98%, so the reading is corroborated rather than contested. The structural risk in ADA is not the emission curve — that decays on its own under a 45 billion hard cap — it is that Cardano has no burn and no buyback, so the only thing that can slow supply growth is the electorate deciding not to spend. That, for now, is what appears to be happening: with committee seats lapsing on Sep 1 2026, only 42.6M ADA left under the raised spending ceiling, and a live queue of just 4.3M ADA, the framework projects +0.31% for the next 90 days. Quiet by circumstance, not by design.

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MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of ADA, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated Aug 29 2026.