Originally published at https://mrnasdog.com/research/xmr/inflation
Monero mints new XMR through proof-of-work mining and nothing else, at a tail emission of 0.6 XMR per block that never halves and never ends. Over the last 90 days the Monero chain produced 64,758 blocks and issued 38.85K XMR, while every buy-side mechanism the framework looks for — buyback, fee burn, foundation buying, long-term lock — reads exactly zero, because Monero has no premine, no treasury and no protocol revenue. The MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads +0.21% net for the window and +0.21% for the next 90 days, against our supply monitor at +0.49% — a gap of 0.28 percentage points, inside tolerance, so no data flag ships.
The verdict, in one paragraph
For the 90-day window ending Aug 28 2026, the MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads XMR at +0.21% net, with the forward view also at +0.21%. Our supply monitor reads the realised change at +0.49%, so the gap is 0.28 percentage points — inside the framework's tolerance, and no monitor-gap flag is warranted. The reconciliation is measured, not assumed. A chain read at both ends of the window puts Monero at block 3,685,406 on May 30 2026 and block 3,750,164 on Aug 28 2026, a span of 64,758 blocks in 90.0 days. That works out to 120.07 seconds a block against Monero's 120-second target, so the chain ran fractionally slow and the target alone would have booked 42 blocks that were never mined. Multiplying observed blocks by the observed block reward gives the issuance directly. XMR is a quiet chain with permanent, flat, slowly-diluting tail emission.
Sell pressure: where new XMR comes from
Sell #1, protocol inflation, is 38.85K XMR and it is the only non-zero row anywhere on the Monero ledger. Monero is proof-of-work, mined with RandomX, so the coinbase is the sole mint: there is no staking emission, no treasury issuance and no bridge minting. The reward itself was measured rather than looked up. Reading 1,500 consecutive block headers across three ranges spanning the window — at the window open, at the midpoint and at the tip — the minimum reward in every range is exactly 0.6 XMR and no block pays less, while the empty blocks pay exactly that and nothing more. Everything above 0.6 in a Monero block is transaction fees, and Monero pays its fees to the miner rather than destroying them, so fees recycle coins that already exist and are not issuance. Multiplying 64,758 measured blocks by the 0.6 XMR tail emission gives 38,855 XMR of genuinely new supply, which is +0.21% of the float, or roughly 0.84% a year — and that annual figure falls a little every year, because the tail emission is a fixed number of coins divided by a growing supply.
Sell #2, vesting unlocks, is zero, and structurally so. Monero launched in April 2014 as a fair, pre-announced launch of the CryptoNote reference code, with no premine, no instamine, no initial coin offering and no developer tax. Nothing was ever allocated to a team, a fund or an investor, so there is no vesting schedule to unlock — which is also why no unlock tracker publishes a Monero calendar. Sell #3, foundation and unscheduled unlocks, is zero for the same structural reason: every XMR in existence was paid to a miner, so there is no foundation reserve, no labs allocation and no decentralised treasury that could decide to sell. Sell #4, long-term locked or bankruptcy, is zero: Monero has no bankruptcy estate, no escrow contract and no locked tranche anywhere in the design. Coins are freely spendable the moment they are mined.
Buy pressure: where new XMR goes
The Monero buy ledger is empty across all four canonical rows, and each zero was verified rather than presumed. Buy #1, programmatic buyback, is zero: Monero retains no protocol revenue of any kind, since the full block reward and every transaction fee go to the miner, so there is no income stream that could fund a buyback and no contract that performs one. Buy #3, foundation buy, is zero for the same reason — there is no foundation entity holding a budget, and contributor work is funded by user donations, which move coins between holders rather than absorbing them off the market. Buy #4, new long-term lock, is zero: Monero is proof-of-work with no staking, no bonding and no lockup contract, so nothing removes coins from the tradable float.
Buy #2, protocol fee burn, is zero and deserves its own paragraph, because a burn is often invisible to a naive supply read. The framework checks a burn two ways. The first check is the destination: on a chain with a token contract, a burn usually means coins parked at a dead address, so that address's balance is read at both ends of the window. Monero has no such surface at all — there is no token contract, no account model and no readable address balance of any kind on a stealth-address ledger, so no dead address exists here and none is documented. The second check is the supply meter, and it settles the question: Monero's coin count rose steadily across the whole window on two independent chain reads that agree with each other to 0.0002%, so nothing was destroyed. A third confirmation comes from the blocks themselves — every sampled block pays its fees out to the miner on top of the 0.6 XMR base, which is direct on-chain evidence that Monero fees are spent, not burned.
Foundation and overhang
There is no team-controlled overhang on Monero in the usual sense, and that is a consequence of the fair launch rather than a data gap: no premine means no foundation wallet, no labs allocation, no DAO treasury, no buyback accumulation wallet and no bankruptcy residual. The one pool worth naming is the community crowdfunding pot, which pays contributors for accepted proposals. It matters that this pot is funded by donations of coins that are already circulating, not by any protocol allocation, so it redistributes supply rather than releasing new supply. Its balance also cannot be read: Monero conceals balances by design, so the pot is tracked through the project's own published proposals and funding pages rather than through a chain query, and it is carried as an opaque overhang at value zero. If that pot's balance falls between refreshes — visible as proposals being paid out — the outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh.
How XMR compares to other proof-of-work chains
Against hard-capped halving chains, Monero made the opposite trade deliberately. A capped chain promises absolute scarcity and pays for it with a security budget that halves toward zero, leaving fees to carry mining revenue at some undefined future date. Monero fixed the security budget instead: tail emission pays a permanent 0.6 XMR a block so miners always have a subsidy, and accepted permanent, small dilution as the price. The dilution is genuinely small and it shrinks — about 0.84% a year today on a float near 18.8M coins, and lower every year after — but it never reaches zero, so Monero can never be described as a capped asset. It is also the reason the Monero reading barely moves between rebuilds: with no halving, no cliff and no governance lever over issuance, the forward number is the trailing number by construction.
Against the other privacy chains, the difference is where the coins came from and who can move them in bulk. Privacy coins that ran a founders' reward, a development-fund carve-out or a locked treasury carry a supply overhang that the framework has to enumerate and watch, and those chains often show a non-zero buy row because consensus locks part of the block reward away. Monero has neither side of that structure: no carve-out to mint, and no lockbox to absorb. Against uncapped continuous-emission proof-of-stake chains, Monero's emission is smaller and far more predictable, because a staking curve responds to how much of the supply is bonded while a fixed per-block coin quantum responds to nothing. The one comparison Monero loses is against chains with a real fee burn, which can run net deflationary in busy periods. Monero cannot: with no burn and no buyback, the ledger has no mechanism capable of producing a negative number, which is exactly why a mildly positive reading is the structural ceiling here.
What to watch in the next 90 days
First, the FCMP++ upgrade, which replaces Monero's ring signatures with full-chain membership proofs. It has no announced mainnet activation height as of Aug 28 2026 and the chain still runs consensus version 16, so it is not scheduled inside this window — and it is a privacy change, not an issuance change, so it would not move this ledger even when it lands. Second, treat claims that a Monero hard fork already shipped in August 2026 with suspicion: several articles say so, and the chain read contradicts them. Third, the tail emission itself is the one thing that could change the reading, and changing it would require a hard fork adopted through Monero's research and contributor process rather than a vote; there is no proposal to do so. Fourth, the community crowdfunding pot, whose proposal payouts are the only observable team-side flow on this chain. Fifth, exchange delistings and privacy regulation, which relocate where XMR trades but create and destroy nothing, so they belong to liquidity rather than to supply.
Summary
Monero issues 38.85K XMR per 90 days from a permanent 0.6 XMR tail emission and absorbs none of it, giving the MrNasdog Pressure Framework a reading of +0.21% for the window just ended and +0.21% for the next one. The structural mechanism is a fair-launch proof-of-work chain with no premine, no vesting, no treasury, no buyback and no burn, so seven of the eight framework rows are zero for reasons written into the protocol rather than for want of an event. The key risk is that this floor is permanent: XMR is uncapped, so holders are diluted a little forever, and no mechanism exists that could make the number negative. The ceiling on the reading is equally firm — with a fixed coin quantum per block and a growing float, the annual rate of roughly 0.84% can only fall from here.
MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of XMR, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated Aug 28 2026.
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