Total supply answers a simple question: how many tokens exist right now? The formula is Total Supply = Minted Tokens minus Burned Tokens. Every token that a protocol has ever created through genesis allocation, mining rewards, staking rewards, or inflationary minting counts toward total supply. Every token that has been permanently destroyed through a burn mechanism is subtracted. The result is the current number of tokens in existence, regardless of whether they are locked, vesting, circulating, or staked. Total supply sits in the middle of the supply hierarchy. It is always greater than or equal to circulating supply, because circulating supply counts only the subset of tokens freely available for trading — excluding locked, vesting, and insider-held tokens. Total supply is always less than or equal to max supply (when a max supply exists), because max supply represents the theoretical lifetime cap that the protocol will never exceed. For tokens like Bitcoin, where not all coins have been mined yet, total supply is less than max supply. For tokens like BNB, where periodic burns reduce the number of existing tokens, total supply decreases over time. On Tokenomist, total supply serves as the denominator for allocation percentages displayed on token detail pages. When a token page shows that 20% is allocated to the team, 15% to investors, and 10% to the ecosystem fund, those percentages are calculated against total supply. The Released Progress bar also uses total supply as its base, showing what fraction of all existing tokens have been released from their locked state. This makes total supply the foundational reference point from which all other supply metrics on Tokenomist derive their context.