Cardano · ADA
A proof-of-stake layer-1 for smart contracts and staking
You need ADA to use the chain, but the headline staking figure locks almost nothing and the economy behind it is small for a top-20 coin.
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ADA · a fading reserve, and a treasury that votes its own money out.
ADA is the coin of Cardano, a proof-of-stake network — ~37.5B circulating under a 45B hard cap. No ADA is ever minted above that cap. New supply is released from a fixed reserve that shrinks a little every five days, and the network's own treasury votes approved budgets out into the market on top of it.
Sell pressure. The reserve put 114.4M ADA into the float over 90 days, and approved treasury spending added a larger 258.0M — 372.4M in total, including a 120.0M liquidity release that landed on Aug 17 2026.
Buy pressure. Almost none. There is no buyback and no burn — fees are recycled to stakers and the treasury, never destroyed. Only 19.6M came back, handed to the treasury.
Net. About +0.94% to market over 90 days — supply grew, and the treasury did most of it. The next 90 days look quieter at +0.31%: the reserve keeps easing and the spending queue is down to 4.3M, with committee seats lapsing on Sep 1 2026.
- Committee seats lapse — spending votes pauseSpending pausesSep 1 2026 · 5 of 8 seats expire; below the minimum, no withdrawal can be approved
- The two live spending votes close+4.3M ADASep 16 2026 · the entire live queue — the rest of the pipeline is empty
- Spending ceiling headroom left to Jul 202742.6M ADASep 1 2026 · all that remains under the raised ceiling agreed on Aug 2 2026
The 45B cap is never breached — new ADA is released from a shrinking reserve, a fixed slice of it every five days. Over 90 days the reserve gave up 181.6M, but 67.2M of that was absorbed by the on-chain treasury, so 114.4M actually reached the tradable float. Because the slice is taken from what is left, every five-day step is smaller than the one before it.
There is no vesting left to unlock. The public sale and the three founding-organisation allocations finished releasing in 2019; no cliff, no schedule and no locked tranche remains.
The on-chain treasury is the larger tap: 20 approved spending votes moved 258.0M ADA out of the treasury and into the market over 90 days, and a single 120.0M open-market liquidity release on Aug 17 2026 is nearly half of it. Most of that 120.0M still sits with a named administrator — 131.8M ADA in one readable account — behind staged release gates. The treasury itself still holds 1,344.9M with no fixed release schedule, and the founding foundation separately holds its own ADA reserves; all three are tracked overhangs.
No bankruptcy estate or court-supervised trustee distributes ADA on a schedule, so nothing arrives from that side.
No public evidence of release in window — monitored.
Cardano destroys nothing, and there is nowhere for it to go: the network has no burn address and no destroy step. Every transaction fee is pooled each epoch and recycled — one fifth to the treasury, the rest to stakers — and supply was measured rising, not falling, at both ends of the window.
No disclosed open-market purchase. The founding foundation's latest published accounts move the other way — ADA fell to about half of its balance sheet from roughly three quarters a year earlier, while bitcoin and cash took a larger share.
Staking here is a pointer, not a lock — delegated ADA never leaves the owner's wallet and can be spent at any time. The only ADA genuinely immobilised by the network is a set of small refundable deposits worth about 0.01% of supply, and that figure fell slightly over the window.
The only real offset: 19.6M ADA was handed back from the market into the on-chain treasury over 90 days, almost all of it credited in one step on Jul 3 2026. It leaves the float, but a future spending vote can release it again.
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