Holder Concentration

Circulating supply tells you how many tokens are unlocked; concentration tells you how many of them are realistically available to trade, which is why a token with a respectable float can behave in the market as though its float were a fraction of the reported number.

TradFi parallel: Like reading free float rather than shares outstanding, after stripping out the blocks held by founders and strategic holders, because shares that never come to market do not participate in setting the price.

Key Takeaways

01
Start with the definition: Circulating supply tells you how many tokens are unlocked; concentration tells you how many of them are realistically available to trade, which is why a token with a respectable float can behave in the market as though its float were a fraction of the reported number.
02
Read the governing documentation before treating a label as a supply conclusion
03
Separate scheduled entitlement, contractual transferability, and actual circulating supply
04
Use dated on-chain or canonical data for any amount, percentage, or event date
05
A buyback, unlock, burn, or reward label does not by itself establish the net supply effect
06
Remove or qualify any project-specific conclusion that cannot be reproduced from a primary source

How It Works

The label alone does not establish a token's current supply impact. To evaluate holder concentration, read the governing token documentation and contract rules, distinguish scheduled entitlement from tokens that are actually transferable or circulating, and use dated on-chain data for any quantity. Do not infer a burn, price effect, holder behavior, or release amount from the label alone.

When a claim depends on a figure, date, allocation, fee route, or prior market event, retain it only when the underlying primary document, governance record, contract state, or reproducible data snapshot is available. Otherwise state the mechanism generally and leave the project-specific conclusion out.