Originally published at mrnasdog.com/research/stx/inflation
Stacks doubled its own money printer inside this window and the headline number barely moved. A hard fork on Jul 30 2026 restored the miner coinbase from 500 STX to 1,000 STX per Bitcoin block, and the ecosystem endowment's separate mint stepped from 475 STX to 1,140 STX per tenure on the same day. Even so, the MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads STX at +0.96% over the trailing 90 days and +1.30% over the next 90, because the base is large: 1,864.7M STX circulating, 17.813M STX of sell pressure, and buy pressure of 0 against a token with no supply ceiling of any kind.
The verdict, in one paragraph
Against a circulating base of 1,864.7M STX, the framework books 17.813M STX of sell pressure and 0 of buy pressure over the trailing 90 days — a net of +0.96% — and projects +1.30% for the next 90 days once both emission legs are re-based onto their post-fork run rate. The inflation monitor reads +0.88% for the same window, a gap of 0.07 percentage points, comfortably inside the framework's 0.5pp tolerance, so no monitor-gap warning ships on the overview page. The two readings agree because Stacks hides almost nothing: the chain's own liquid-supply figure equals its total supply, so there is no large non-circulating bucket for the two methods to classify differently. The label for STX is an uncapped Bitcoin layer that just raised its own issuance: modest today, structurally rising, and with no burn or buyback anywhere to push back.
Sell pressure: where new STX comes from
Stacks mints on two separate legs, and both are indexed to Bitcoin rather than to a wall clock. The first is the miner coinbase, paid once per Bitcoin block. SIP-029 had stepped it down to 500 STX in April 2026; SIP-045, the PoX-5 hard fork that activated at Bitcoin block 960,230 on Jul 30 2026, restored it to 1,000 STX and threw away the reduction ladder entirely. Measured against the chain rather than the published rate, the reward actually landed on 99.0% of Bitcoin blocks before the fork and 98.4% after it, because a Bitcoin block that produces no valid Stacks tenure pays nobody. That gives Sell #1, protocol inflation, at 9.225M STX for the window, with the post-fork run rate projecting 13.553M STX across the next 90 days.
The second leg is the SIP-031 ecosystem endowment, which mints straight into a boot contract on the Stacks chain rather than to miners, and which is indexed to the tenure start block rather than to the Bitcoin block. It stepped from 475 STX to 1,140 STX per tenure at Bitcoin block 960,300, hours after the fork. Over these 90 days it minted 7,174,590 STX into that contract, which the published schedule predicts at 7,170,980 STX — a residual of 3,610 STX, or three tenure-mints of boundary offset between the two activation heights. That leg is booked separately as Sell #5, endowment emission, at 7.175M STX, because the coins land in a treasury rather than in tradable hands, and its post-fork rate projects 10.693M STX across the next 90 days. This is also why measuring the tenure rate mattered: only 74.20% of Bitcoin blocks produced a tenure in this window, so treating the endowment mint as a per-Bitcoin-block payment would have overstated it by roughly a third.
Sell #2, vesting unlocks, is 0. The original Stacks unlock ladder is finished: the chain reported 100.00% of STX unlocked at both ends of this window, and no cliff falls inside it. Sell #4, long-term locked or bankruptcy, is 0 as well — STX has no bankruptcy estate, no trustee and no court-ordered distribution attached to it.
Sell #3, Foundation and unscheduled unlocks, is 1.413M STX, and it is the ecosystem treasury spending its own stock. On Jul 2 2026 the endowment contract released 58.497M STX in only the second claim of its entire life. The receiving multisig passed 31.047M STX straight through to the operating wallet, which then sent 44.236M STX out across seventeen separate transfers, while an older holding wallet drained to dust and a brand-new one appeared inside the window holding 61.020M STX. Taken as one cluster of six addresses, the treasury held 178.308M STX on Jun 10 2026 and 169.720M STX on Sep 8 2026 — 8.588M STX lighter. But 7.175M of that fall is simply the fresh minting of Sell #5 passing through, already counted there, so only 1.413M STX of pre-existing treasury stock actually reached the market and only that is booked here. Since the fork the cluster has taken in more than it released, so this row projects 0 for the next 90 days — and the surplus is not credited as demand either, because a treasury growing its stock is an overhang, not a buyer.
Buy pressure: where new STX goes
Nowhere. Buy #1, programmatic buyback, is 0 — Stacks runs no programme that spends treasury money repurchasing STX on the open market, and none was announced or executed inside the window. If anything the treasury runs the other way: it receives freshly minted STX and spends more than it receives.
Buy #2, protocol fee burn, is 0, and this row was read on both surfaces rather than one, because a burn can hide on either. Transaction fees on Stacks are paid to miners, not destroyed. The burn address rose from 3,172.35 STX to 3,173.32 STX — a genuine removal of under 1 STX in 90 days, closing to the decimal against its own balance change. The count of STX in existence rose rather than fell, so nothing was destroyed above the new issuance either. The two surfaces are structurally independent on Stacks, so this is not one flow seen twice. The PoX-5 fork did remove a burn, but the thing it burned was Bitcoin, not STX.
Buy #3, Foundation buy, is 0. Every inflow the Stacks treasury wallets received in this window arrived either as protocol minting or as a transfer between the Foundation's own addresses, which is supply arriving on its own rather than demand. Buy #4, new long-term lock, is 0, and stacking moved the wrong way in any case: locked STX fell from 504.262M in the reward cycle live at the start of the window to 421.494M in the cycle live at the end. Even a rise would not have counted, because Stacks defines its own liquid supply as equal to its total supply, so stacked STX is already inside the number this page divides by.
Foundation and overhang
The overhang on STX is the ecosystem endowment, and it is large: 169.720M STX, about 9.1% of circulating supply, spread across six addresses that were walked end to end this window rather than sampled. Those are the SIP-031 emission contract, still holding 60.064M STX and still being minted into every tenure; the claim multisig at 45.942M STX; the operating multisig at 2.694M STX; the old holding wallet now emptied to 0.02 STX; a new holding wallet created inside the window at 61.020M STX; and a sixth, retired wallet holding 0.78 STX that moved nothing but fee dust. Every one of the six closes its own inflow-minus-outflow identity against its measured balance change, and the five sub-ranges of the supply series close against the whole-window reading with a residual of exactly zero.
What this reading cannot fully see is the other direction: 10.272M STX arrived in the cluster from addresses outside it, and if any of that came from a Foundation wallet not enumerated here, the true drain is larger than 8.588M STX, never smaller — so the row is a floor. The trigger sentence applies to all six: if the cluster's combined balance falls between refreshes, the outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh.
How STX compares to other uncapped Bitcoin-anchored chains
The obvious comparison is to Bitcoin itself, and it is the wrong shape twice over. Bitcoin has a hard cap and a halving schedule that only ever cuts issuance; Stacks has no cap at all, and in this window it did the opposite of a halving — a governance vote doubled the coinbase back to 1,000 STX per Bitcoin block and deleted the reduction ladder that would have kept cutting it. Stacks borrows Bitcoin's clock without borrowing its scarcity: the emission is block-indexed to Bitcoin, so the realised Bitcoin interval of 599.76 seconds against a 600-second target is the only thing linking the two supply curves, and at four hundredths of a percent it changes nothing.
Against uncapped continuous-emission layer-ones, STX looks mild on the headline and unusual in structure. A Cosmos-style chain paying 5% to 15% a year to stakers reads far hotter than +0.96% a quarter. But those chains pay one stream to one constituency; Stacks pays two, and the second one — the endowment — is a discretionary treasury with a spender rather than a schedule. That is the exchange-token comparison inverted. An exchange token routes revenue into quarterly buybacks and burns, so its inflation reading can go negative when usage is strong. Stacks routes new issuance into a treasury that then deploys it, so its reading gets worse when the treasury is active, and the treasury was very active this window.
What to watch in the next 90 days
First, whether the endowment claims again: the contract holds 60.064M STX and has fired exactly twice in its life, the second time on Jul 2 2026, so a third claim is the single largest discretionary event available on this chain. Second, the Genesis Bond, opening on reward cycle 143 around Sep 10 2026, and the DeFi incentives programme starting around Sep 19 2026 — both pay in Bitcoin rather than STX and should not touch this reading, but a large shift in stacked STX changes who holds the float. Third, PoX-6: SIP-045 describes the restored 1,000 STX coinbase as provisional for the PoX-5 bootstrap and promises an explicit emission reassessment in the next proposal, which is the one governance decision that could halve or double this page. Fourth, the endowment's own next step, from 1,140 STX to 1,705 STX per tenure at Bitcoin block 1,012,860 in 2027 — outside this window, but it is the direction of travel.
Summary
The MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads STX at +0.96% over the trailing 90 days and +1.30% projected forward: supply growing, projected to keep growing. The structural mechanism is two block-indexed mint streams, both of which stepped UP on Jul 30 2026 — the miner coinbase back to 1,000 STX per Bitcoin block, and the ecosystem endowment to 1,140 STX per tenure — against a buy side that is empty in every row, including a burn that removed under 1 STX in 90 days. The key risk is that neither the issuance nor the treasury is bounded: STX has no maximum supply, the coinbase was restored by a vote and can be raised by another, and the endowment still holds 169.720M STX with a spender rather than a calendar. What keeps the number small is only the size of the base — 1,864.7M STX already circulating — and that base is the one thing on this chain that cannot shrink.
MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of STX, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated Sep 8 2026.
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