Supply Offset

Supply offset answers one question: of the tokens in circulation, what share has the project itself taken back out. On a token's Burn tab it reads as the percentage of circulating supply offset by burn activities. On the Buyback tab it reads as the percentage of circulating supply offset by buyback activities. Both carry the Tokenomist Metric chip, meaning the number is computed by Tokenomist from tracked events rather than quoted from a project disclosure. The percentage denominator is what makes the metric portable: a burn total in tokens is meaningless across projects with different supply scales, while a share of circulating supply ranks directly. Some views let you switch the denominator between circulating and released supply, and the same activity produces a different percentage under each, so figures are only comparable when computed on the same basis.

Burn offset and buyback offset are reported separately, and Tokenomist does not publish a single combined figure. That is deliberate. A burn is meant to be irreversible: the tokens are destroyed and cannot practically re-enter circulation. Even that claim comes in two strengths, because a send to a provably unspendable address is cryptographic destruction, while a burn recognised over a keyless address is binding social consensus reflected on a supply metric. A buyback takes tokens off the market but not necessarily permanently, because a Treasury Buyback leaves them outstanding and available for redeployment into incentives, compensation or strategic use. Adding the two would assert an equivalence that does not hold. It would also risk double counting, since a Buyback and Burn program legitimately appears in both datasets: the purchase is a buyback event and the destruction that follows is a burn event.

Offset is the same force that sits inside Tokenomist's emission figure. Emission is defined as Inflation minus Deflation, so burns and buyback burns are already netted into it as the deflation term. Supply offset takes that term out and expresses it against supply instead, which is a different and complementary reading. Emission tells you the direction and size of net supply change. Offset tells you how much of the counterweight came from the project's own balance sheet rather than from a lull in the unlock schedule. One caveat travels with this: Tokenomist deliberately excludes burns from forward emission projections because burn rates depend on activity and governance and are not predictable, so a large historical offset is evidence of what a project has done, not a commitment about the next quarter.

This is why a token can run high emission and still see its effective float shrink. Gross inflation from cliff and linear unlocks can be substantial while a revenue funded burn or buyback program removes a comparable or larger share of circulating supply over the same window, leaving net supply flat or falling. Once offset is large, the useful questions turn from size to durability. Offset funded by protocol fees or operating revenue scales with adoption and repeats. Offset funded from a finite treasury or a single external raise does not, and a headline percentage produced that way describes a past event rather than a running mechanism. The Burn Screener and Buyback Screener rank projects by offset so that comparison can be made across the tracked universe instead of one token at a time.