Originally published at mrnasdog.com/research/tezos/inflation.
TL;DR. Tezos is an uncapped proof-of-stake chain, and XTZ is the rare coin whose issuance rate is chosen by the protocol itself: adaptive issuance re-tunes the staking-reward rate every cycle from how much XTZ is staked, anywhere inside a 0.25% to 10% band. Read live on Aug 10 2026 that rate is 3.02% a year, and the chain minted 8.63M XTZ over the last 90 days against a circulating base of 1.09B. Burns are almost nothing — 94K XTZ across storage fees and voluntary sends — and Tezos runs no buyback at all, so the MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads +0.78% net for the window and +0.75% for the next one. Our supply monitor reads +0.65%, a gap of 0.13 percentage points, comfortably inside tolerance.
The verdict, in one paragraph
For the 90-day window ending Aug 9 2026, the Pressure Framework reads XTZ at +0.78% net. Sell pressure is 8.64M XTZ, almost entirely adaptive-issuance staking rewards, and buy pressure is 0.09M XTZ of burns, against a circulating base of 1,093.03M XTZ. Our supply monitor reads the realised change at +0.65%, a gap of only 0.13 percentage points, which is inside the framework's tolerance — no data-conflict flag, and no deep walk required. The chain's own arithmetic corroborates it independently: created minus burned minus destroyed equals the change in total supply exactly, to the mutez. Tezos is best characterised as a structurally inflationary chain with a self-regulating dial — dilution that is mild, predictable, and slowly easing as staking grows.
Sell pressure: where new XTZ comes from
Sell #1, protocol inflation, is effectively the whole story: 8.63M XTZ minted over 90 days as baking and attesting rewards. What makes Tezos unusual is that the emission is not a fixed schedule and not a halving — it is adaptive issuance, a protocol mechanism that recomputes the yearly reward rate every cycle and steers it toward a target of roughly half the supply being staked. Read straight from a node this session, the live rate is 3.023% a year, bounded by protocol constants at a floor of 0.25% and a ceiling of 10%. The staked ratio climbed from 26.5% to 31.4% across this window, and issuance responded exactly as designed — weekly annualised minting ran 3.5% to 3.7% in early May and 2.9% to 3.1% through July and August. Because that early-May rate has already been retired by the mechanism, the forward column uses the live run rate rather than the trailing blend, projecting 8.25M XTZ for the next 90 days.
Sell #2, vesting unlocks, is zero, and permanently so. All 32 on-chain vesting contracts from the 2018 Tezos fundraiser read a balance of zero this session — the schedule is physically spent, there is no unlock calendar, and there is no cliff to arrive. Sell #3, Foundation and unscheduled unlocks, is 4.6K XTZ: the labelled Tezos Foundation baker and delegator wallets actually grew from 72.1M to 82.9M XTZ over the window, so they contributed no sell pressure whatsoever, and the only genuine inflow to the tradable float from this family is old 2017 fundraiser commitments being activated. Sell #4, long-term locked or bankruptcy, is zero: Tezos launched from a public fundraiser, has never been through an insolvency, and has no estate or trustee distribution to book.
Buy pressure: where new XTZ goes
The buy side of the Tezos ledger is thin by design. Buy #1, programmatic buyback, is zero: transaction fees on Tezos go to bakers as income, not to a contract that buys XTZ on the open market, and no governance proposal has sought to change that — there is no buyback engine and no accumulation wallet to track. Buy #2, protocol fee burn, is 17.5K XTZ. Tezos does destroy XTZ, but only as a storage charge: 250 mutez per byte written to the chain, plus a fixed charge for creating a new account or contract. Over 90 days that burn came to roughly a five-hundredth of what the same window minted, and it is flat enough that the forward column projects the same figure.
Buy #3, Foundation buy, is zero — the Foundation wallets grew, but from internal transfers and baking rewards, not from open-market purchases, and no Foundation or Labs entity has disclosed an XTZ buying programme. Buy #4, new long-term lock, is zero: staking on Tezos finalises an unstake in a few days, so staked XTZ is functionally liquid and removes no float, and the protocol-native liquid staking token that shipped in the Jun 30 2026 upgrade sits behind a feature flag pending a separate vote. One extra mechanism earns its own row. Buy #5, voluntary burns to the dead address, is 76.8K XTZ — anyone can destroy XTZ by sending it to the chain's null address, and its balance matches the chain's destruction counter exactly. It is kept separate from the storage burn because it is a different mechanism, and 60.3K of the 90-day total arrived in a single transfer on May 15 2026, so the forward column uses the ongoing pace of about 13K instead.
Foundation and overhang
Two team-controlled overhangs are tracked on Tezos. The first is the Tezos Foundation treasury, read this session across 25 labelled baker and delegator wallets: 72,142,207 XTZ at the start of the window and 82,920,330 XTZ now, a gain of 10.8M XTZ. That direction matters — the largest identified holder on the chain accumulated rather than distributed across the whole window, which is why Sell #3 books no Foundation outflow. These wallets are read on-chain at every rebuild. The second is the unactivated 2017 fundraiser commitments: 20.0M XTZ that were committed but never claimed, sitting outside circulating supply with no schedule and no deadline, of which only 4,588 XTZ were claimed in 90 days. There is no separate DAO treasury on Tezos — governance decides protocol upgrades, not spending — and no buyback wallet, because there is no buyback. If either of these balances falls between refreshes, the outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh.
How XTZ compares to other uncapped proof-of-stake chains
The first comparison is against fixed-schedule emission. A hard-capped chain like Bitcoin settles its issuance in code once and lets a halving cut it in half on a calendar; the holder knows the sell pressure years in advance and it only ever falls. Tezos gives up that certainty deliberately. Adaptive issuance means XTZ has no cap and no halving, and the rate can move up as well as down inside its 0.25% to 10% band. What the holder gets in exchange is a rate that self-corrects: as more of the supply gets staked, dilution falls automatically, and the framework can watch the staked ratio as a leading indicator of the next quarter's issuance.
The second comparison is against the burn-offset chains. Ethereum issues to validators too, but its base-fee burn scales with demand and can push net supply negative in busy periods; BNB runs a quarterly buyback that ends in a burn address. Tezos has neither. Its only burn is a storage charge that comes to 17.5K XTZ a quarter against 8.63M minted — an offset of roughly one part in five hundred, which rounds to nothing at the ledger level. That is the structural point: on Tezos, network usage does not push back on supply, so the mint rate is the whole equation and the buy side can be treated as a rounding error.
The third comparison is against the uncapped peers that Tezos most resembles — Solana, Polkadot, Cosmos. Those chains also mint continuously to stakers, but on a schedule set by a disinflation curve or a bonded-ratio rule. Tezos sits closest to the bonded-ratio model, and its current 3.02% a year is mid-pack: higher than a mature chain running a tapered curve, lower than a young chain bootstrapping validators. The distinguishing feature is not the level but the governance path — the mechanism itself can be replaced by an on-chain protocol vote, without a hard fork.
What to watch in the next 90 days
First, the staked ratio, now 31.4% against a protocol target near 50% — every point it climbs pulls the issuance rate down, and it is the single cleanest leading indicator of the next quarter's Sell #1. Second, the Protocol V vote that would activate sTEZ, the protocol-native liquid staking token that shipped switched off in the Jun 30 2026 Ushuaia upgrade; if it passes, staking participation could step up sharply and pull issuance down with it. Third, the live adaptive issuance rate itself, re-read from a node at every rebuild — it was 3.02% on Aug 10 2026 and has been falling. Fourth, the Tezos Foundation wallets, which accumulated 10.8M XTZ this window and would turn into real sell pressure the moment that direction reverses. Fifth, any governance proposal touching the issuance curve or introducing a fee burn, since either would be the first structural change to this ledger in two years.
Summary
Tezos has no supply cap, no halving and no buyback, so XTZ dilutes its holders every quarter by design — 8.63M XTZ minted over the last 90 days against 94K burned, which the Pressure Framework reads as +0.78% net and projects at +0.75% for the next window. What separates it from an ordinary inflationary chain is adaptive issuance: the protocol sets its own reward rate from the staked ratio inside a 0.25% to 10% band, so dilution is self-regulating and has been easing steadily, from a rate near 3.7% a year in May to 3.02% today. The key risk is that the burn side is a rounding error, meaning network usage never pushes back on supply and the mint rate is the entire equation. The key thing that would change the reading is the staked ratio continuing toward the 50% target, which mechanically lowers issuance without any governance action at all.
MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of Tezos (XTZ), Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated Aug 10 2026.
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