Originally published at mrnasdog.com/research/hbar/inflation by MrNasdog.
Hedera created all 50 billion HBAR at launch and has no way to make more, so HBAR inflation is not emission — it is the Hedera Governing Council moving already-minted HBAR out of reserve. Over the 90 days to Aug 10 2026 the tradable float grew 418M HBAR, in two discrete Council release lots, while nothing at all removed supply: Hedera runs no buyback and burns no fees. The Pressure Framework reads +0.95% net against a supply monitor at +0.98% — a gap of about 0.03 percentage points, well inside tolerance.
The verdict, in one paragraph
For the 90-day window ending Aug 10 2026, the MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads HBAR at +0.95% net supply growth, and projects the same +0.95% forward. Total sell pressure was 418M HBAR; total buy pressure was zero. Our supply monitor reads the same window at +0.98%, leaving a gap of about 0.03 percentage points — far inside the half-point tolerance, so no monitor-gap chip ships on the HBAR overview. The two agree closely for an unusual reason worth naming: on Hedera, the number the wider market calls circulating supply is a value the network itself publishes, so the framework and the monitor are reading the same on-chain quantity rather than two competing classifications; the small residual is mcap-over-price rounding noise on the monitor's baseline day. The cite-able label for HBAR is a fixed-ceiling chain releasing reserve onto the float in lumps — mildly inflationary today, with a hard limit on how much inflation is left.
Sell pressure: where new HBAR comes from
The headline fact is that Sell #1, protocol inflation, is zero — and it is zero in the strongest sense available. Hedera minted the entire 50 billion HBAR supply at genesis in 2018, and the Hedera ledger has no operation that creates HBAR. Total supply equals maximum supply; raising the cap would take unanimous consent from every member of the Hedera Governing Council. Staking is not an exception: Hedera pays staking rewards out of a pre-funded reward pool that already sits inside the circulating float, so a reward payment moves HBAR between holders instead of minting any. An uncapped chain with continuous issuance would carry that flow in Sell #1; HBAR carries nothing there at all.
Sell #2, vesting unlocks, is also zero. There is no dated team or investor cliff falling inside this window, and Hedera does not publish a per-date vesting calendar for the float. What remains undistributed sits with the Governing Council and moves when the Council decides it moves — which is a different mechanism, and belongs in a different row rather than being counted twice.
All of HBAR's real supply growth therefore lands in Sell #3, Foundation and unscheduled unlocks, at 418M HBAR over the window. Reading the network's own supply record gives a flat float plateau of about 43,373M HBAR in mid-May 2026 and an exact 43,791M HBAR on Aug 10 2026. The shape of that growth matters more than the total: it is a staircase, not a slope. The float was flat for weeks, took roughly 100M HBAR of Council release in mid-to-late Jun 2026, sat flat again, then took roughly 317M HBAR across Jul 1 2026 to Jul 3 2026, including one clean 150M HBAR lot — and has been flat ever since, with no new release in the three weeks to Aug 10 2026. Anyone modelling HBAR unlocks as a smooth monthly drip is modelling the wrong mechanism.
Sell #4, long-term locked or bankruptcy, is zero. No bankruptcy estate or court-ordered distribution holds HBAR, so there is no trustee release schedule to track. We also carry a fifth row for the staking reward pool, currently valued at zero: that pool fell to about 155.9M HBAR, down roughly 41M across the window, but because it already sits inside the float, its payouts add no supply. It is a watch item rather than a live row — at this drain rate the pool has roughly a year left, and a top-up from reserve would be genuine new float.
Buy pressure: where new HBAR goes
Nowhere, and that is the structural point about HBAR. Buy #1, programmatic buyback, is zero: neither the Hedera network nor the Governing Council operates any contract or programme that repurchases HBAR. Buy #2, protocol fee burn, is zero, and this is the single most misunderstood fact about Hedera tokenomics. Hedera does not destroy transaction fees. Fees pool in a network account and are handed back out to the staking reward pool, to node rewards and to the treasury, so a busy day on Hedera recirculates HBAR rather than removing it. A fee-burning chain converts usage into deflation; Hedera converts usage into redistribution, and the network's fee revenue is small enough that even a full burn would barely register against a 43.8B float.
Buy #3, Foundation buy, is zero — there is no public evidence of the Council or the Foundation buying HBAR on the open market in the window. Buy #4, new long-term lock, is zero as well: no lockup contract or staking cap landed in the window, and Hedera's native staking has no lock-up at all, since a delegation can be withdrawn at any time. A US spot exchange-traded fund now custodies roughly 1.6% of the HBAR float, which is real absorption — but its shares redeem on demand, so the framework treats it as demand rather than a lock and keeps it out of the supply ledger. With every buy row empty, HBAR's net reading is simply its release rate.
Foundation and overhang
The overhang is easy to size and hard to ignore: 50B capped supply minus a 43.79B float leaves about 6.21B HBAR — roughly 12% of all HBAR that will ever exist — held across Governing Council reserve accounts. That balance covers ecosystem and open-source development, purchase agreements, network governance and operations, and initial development, and as of 2025 every last unit of it is allocated to one of those buckets rather than unassigned. Some of that reserve has already been committed to ecosystem foundations that hold it off the float.
There is one trap here worth spelling out, because it produces alarming headlines. Hedera's own treasury report counts HBAR as released on its own schedule as it leaves a Council-controlled account for another party — usually a Foundation — which puts its released figure at about 87% of the cap as of the Apr to Jun 2026 quarter. The tradable float is a different number, and the two can diverge by hundreds of millions. The published guidance is measured on the wider definition and consistently overshoots what actually reaches the market: guidance of about 4B HBAR for the Apr to Jun 2026 quarter produced 187M of real release, and guidance for Jul to Sep 2026 again sits near 4B, of which about 3.8B is the ecosystem-development line that has rolled forward for several quarters without moving. The framework books only the float, re-reads the reserve on every rebuild, and treats the guidance as a ceiling rather than a forecast. If reserve or Foundation balances fall between refreshes, that outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh.
How HBAR compares to other capped-supply chains
HBAR shares its hard cap with Bitcoin, but almost nothing else. Bitcoin's inflation is issuance: new coins are mined into existence on a halving schedule known years ahead, and the cap binds in 2140. HBAR's cap already binds — every HBAR exists today — so HBAR inflation is purely a custody question, the transfer of already-minted coins from a governed reserve to the market. That makes HBAR's supply path far more knowable in size and far less knowable in timing: the total remaining is capped at 6.21B HBAR and can never exceed it, but the release dates are a Council decision rather than a block-height rule.
Against uncapped continuous-emission layer-1s, HBAR looks better on the ceiling and worse on the offset. A staking chain that mints new supply every epoch has no upper bound at all, but many of them burn a share of fees, so heavy usage genuinely claws supply back. Hedera has no such valve — no fee burn, no buyback — so activity on the Hedera network never reduces HBAR supply, and the net reading has a floor of zero on the buy side no matter how busy the network gets. Full EVM compatibility, announced on Jul 21 2026, may bring more usage; under the current fee model it will not bring deflation.
The nearest structural analogues are the other pre-mined, foundation-governed enterprise chains where a council or foundation holds a large reserve and meters it out. Against that class HBAR is unusually transparent — the reserve balance is readable on-chain at any moment, and the Council publishes a quarterly treasury report — and unusually far through its distribution, with roughly 88% of the cap already on the float. The comparison that flatters HBAR least is with an exchange token running a quarterly buyback: those coins convert business revenue into supply removal, which is exactly the mechanism HBAR lacks.
What to watch in the next 90 days
First, the close of the Jul to Sep 2026 release quarter on Sep 30 2026. About 317M HBAR of Council release landed onto the float in early July against guidance near 4B, and the float has been flat since; whether the rest of the quarter stays quiet or delivers another lump is the single biggest input to the next reading. Second, the next Hedera treasury report and its Oct to Dec 2026 guidance, which sets the shape of the following window. Third, the staking reward pool: it is draining at roughly 41M HBAR per 90 days toward about 155.9M HBAR, and the first top-up from reserve would convert a float-neutral mechanism into real new supply. Fourth, any governance move on the fee model — a decision to burn rather than redistribute network fees would be the first buy-side row HBAR has ever carried. Fifth, whether the spot exchange-traded fund keeps absorbing float; it does not enter the supply ledger, but a reversal would remove a meaningful bid under the release flow.
Summary
HBAR is a hard-capped coin whose inflation comes entirely from custody, not issuance: Hedera created all 50 billion HBAR at launch, mints none, and burns none, so the only thing moving supply is the Hedera Governing Council releasing reserve onto the float — 418M HBAR over the 90 days to Aug 10 2026, for +0.95% net, matched by our supply monitor at +0.98%. The key risk is that nothing on the buy side offsets it: with no buyback and no fee burn, HBAR's net reading can only ever be zero or positive, and rising network usage cannot change that under the current fee model. The key comfort is the ceiling: about 6.21B HBAR remains in reserve, roughly 12% of the cap, and no mechanism exists to create a single unit beyond it. HBAR's supply is best read as a finite, lumpy, governed drawdown with a known end — not as an open-ended emission.
MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of HBAR, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated Aug 10 2026.
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