Originally published at mrnasdog.com/research/kaia/inflation by MrNasdog.
Kaia is an uncapped layer-1 that mints a flat 9.6 KAIA in every one-second block, which created about 74.65M KAIA over the trailing 90 days — roughly 4.7% a year — against a buy side of only 0.22M KAIA of burned gas fees, no buyback and no vesting left to unlock. That leaves the MrNasdog Pressure Framework at +1.17% net on Kaia, a steadily inflationary chain whose dilution has no ceiling and no scheduled taper. Our supply monitor reads +9.15%, but that figure is a one-day 519M recount in the market-data feed on Jul 29 2026, not new Kaia issuance.
The verdict, in one paragraph
For the 90-day window closing Aug 10 2026, the MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads Kaia at +1.17% net, and projects the same +1.17% forward, because the Kaia block reward is a fixed constant rather than a curve. Our supply monitor reads +9.15% over the same window, a gap of 7.98 percentage points — far outside the framework's 0.5-point tolerance, so a ⚠ monitor gap warning ships on the KAIA overview. The deep walk settles the disagreement cleanly. On-chain, the Kaia reward configuration returned the same 9.6 KAIA per block at both ends of the window, at block 216,367,320 and again at block 224,143,320, so the chain minted 74.65M KAIA and nothing else. The monitor's supply series, meanwhile, sat flat near 5.86B every single day through Jul 28 2026 and then jumped +519M in one day on Jul 29 2026 — arithmetically impossible at Kaia's issuance rate of about 0.83M a day, and therefore a recount of a previously under-stated field. Kaia is best characterised as a quiet chain with loud, permanent dilution: the emission is unremarkable in percentage terms but it never stops, and there is nothing structural on the other side of it.
Sell pressure: where new KAIA comes from
Sell #1 — protocol inflation — is essentially the whole Kaia ledger, at about 74.65M KAIA over the trailing 90 days. Kaia is a proof-of-stake chain with a one-second block time and a fixed per-block mint: the reward parameter read on-chain this session is 9.6 KAIA per block, which is 829,440 KAIA a day and roughly 302.7M KAIA a year, about 4.7% of the circulating base. The number is a constant, not a schedule. There is no halving in Kaia, no decay curve, no terminal supply and no ceiling — only a governance parameter that could be voted down and has not been. Of each block, 40% pays stakers, 25% each funds the Kaia ecosystem fund and the Kaia infrastructure fund, and since Jul 23 2026 the final 10% flows to a contribution reward pool rather than the block proposer. That change, from Kaia governance proposal GP-21, altered who is paid and not how much is created — the on-chain minted field reads 9.6 KAIA on both sides of the fork block — so the framework does not re-base the forward projection.
Sell #2 — vesting unlocks — is zero on Kaia. KAIA came into existence through the Aug 2024 merger of the Klaytn and Finschia chains, and the migrated balances plus the fund allocations all released at or before that event; the unlock trackers show no remaining cliff for KAIA on any future date. Sell #3 — foundation and unscheduled unlocks — is also zero for this window, and the reasoning matters. The Kaia ecosystem fund, the Kaia infrastructure fund and the new contribution reward pool held about 209.0M KAIA between them at the start of the window and about 217.8M KAIA at the end: they grew rather than drew down. The one large movement was a 30M KAIA transfer out of the infrastructure fund on Jun 16 2026, which the on-chain balance confirms to within a rounding error — and Kaia's own notice states that the transfer leaves circulating supply unchanged because both the sending and the receiving wallets already sit inside it. Those tokens were counted once, as Sell #1, when they were minted; counting them again here would be double counting. Sell #4 — long-term locked or bankruptcy — is zero, because no bankruptcy estate, trustee schedule or court-ordered distribution holds KAIA.
Buy pressure: where new KAIA goes
The buy side on Kaia is close to empty, which is what makes the reading straightforward. Buy #1 — programmatic buyback — is zero: Kaia runs no mechanism that converts fees or treasury cash into KAIA repurchases, and no ecosystem entity has disclosed one. Buy #2 — protocol fee burn — exists but is tiny, about 0.22M KAIA over the 90 days. Kaia burns half of every transaction fee, plus anything above the block proposer's share, but the chain is cheap and lightly used, so the burn averages about 0.028 KAIA per block when sampled across the window. Set against 74.65M minted, that offsets under 0.3% of issuance — a rounding error rather than a counterweight.
Buy #3 — foundation buy — is zero: no Kaia entity has disclosed an open-market KAIA purchase and there is no accumulation wallet to read, because the ecosystem and infrastructure funds are spenders of minted allocation rather than buyers. Buy #4 — new long-term lock — is zero as well; staking KAIA parks it in a validator contract the holder can withdraw from, and the supply figure counts it either way, so growth in staked KAIA does not remove supply from the tradable float. The genuinely new item is Buy #5, a contribution reward burn, and it has not fired yet. Since Jul 23 2026 the 10% slice of every block — 0.96 KAIA, about 2.5M KAIA a month — accrues to a contribution reward pool, and whatever the pool fails to distribute is burned on-chain in a batch every three roughly-thirty-day cycles. The pool had accumulated 1.51M KAIA at the last read with no outflow and no burn. Because the burn quantum depends entirely on how much goes undistributed and no figure has been published, the framework tracks the row at zero rather than projecting one.
Foundation and overhang
Kaia has three identified team-controlled wallets, and all three are read on-chain. The Kaia ecosystem fund held about 148.7M KAIA at the last read, up from about 130.0M ninety days earlier — it has spent nothing and simply accrues its 25% block share. The Kaia infrastructure fund held about 67.7M KAIA, down from about 79.0M, the drop being the 30M KAIA budget transfer on Jun 16 2026 into the fund's own executor wallet, disclosed in advance through Kaia governance and confirmed on-chain. The contribution reward pool is the newest and smallest, at 1.51M KAIA accrued since Jul 23 2026. There is no separate labs treasury, no DAO treasury distinct from these funds and no bankruptcy residual. All of these wallets already sit inside the circulating supply figure the framework divides by, so their disbursements are movements within the float rather than additions to it — the dilution was booked when the coins were minted. If any balance falls between refreshes through an outflow not funded by fresh minting, that outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh.
How KAIA compares to other uncapped layer-1 chains
Kaia sits in the uncapped continuous-emission class, alongside the large proof-of-stake layer-1s that mint staking rewards with no ceiling — but its mechanism is unusually blunt. Most uncapped chains modulate issuance: some target a staked ratio and move the reward rate toward it, some run a decaying emission curve, some tie issuance to validator count. Kaia does none of that. It mints a hard-coded 9.6 KAIA per block regardless of price, usage, staking participation or validator economics. That cuts both ways: a reader never has to guess what next quarter's Kaia issuance will be, but nothing about a bull market or a usage spike will slow it down either.
Against a chain with a real fee burn, the contrast is sharper. A base-fee burn lets an uncapped chain go net deflationary when block space is contested; Kaia burns gas fees too, but at 0.22M KAIA a quarter against 74.65M minted, the mechanism exists on paper and not in the numbers. Against a hard-capped halving-model asset, Kaia is the structural opposite: the capped asset's issuance converges on zero, while Kaia's converges on nothing at all. And against an exchange token that buys back and burns from revenue, Kaia has no offset at all. The one thing that could move Kaia toward the burn-bearing group is the GP-21 contribution reward mechanism, which for the first time makes part of issuance conditional on measurable contribution and destroys the remainder.
What to watch in the next 90 days
Watch the first contribution-reward batch burn, due around Oct 21 2026: three cycles after the Jul 23 2026 activation, Kaia burns whatever the contribution reward pool failed to distribute, and that single disclosure will tell us whether the mechanism removes a meaningful share of the 2.5M KAIA monthly budget or almost none of it. Watch the reward minting parameter itself, which Kaia governance can change by vote and which is the only thing that would move Sell #1 off 74.65M a quarter. Watch the ecosystem and infrastructure fund balances for any outflow that is not funded by fresh block reward, since that is what would lift Sell #3 above zero. Watch the next Kaia use-of-funds proposal, following the GP-22 vote that passed between May 19 2026 and Jun 2 2026. And watch the supply feed our monitor reads: the 519M recount of Jul 29 2026 rolls out of the trailing 90-day window at the end of Oct 2026, at which point the monitor should converge back toward the framework's +1.17%.
Summary
The MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads Kaia at +1.17% net supply growth over 90 days and projects the same forward, because Kaia mints a fixed 9.6 KAIA in every one-second block — about 74.65M KAIA a quarter, roughly 4.7% a year — with no cap, no halving and no taper, on a circulating base of about 6.386B KAIA. The buy side is effectively empty: 0.22M KAIA of burned gas fees, no buyback, no foundation purchase and no vesting left to unlock, and the ecosystem and infrastructure funds grew rather than sold. The key risk is that this dilution is permanent and demand-insensitive: nothing in the Kaia mechanism slows issuance if usage or price disappoints, and the only structural counterweight is the untested GP-21 contribution reward burn whose first batch falls due around Oct 21 2026. The monitor's +9.15% reading should be disregarded as a one-day 519M supply recount on Jul 29 2026, not Kaia issuance.
MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of KAIA, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated Aug 10 2026.
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