ADA Inflation Analysis · October 2026 · Supply was growing · trend cooling

Cardano's ADA supply grew +0.74% in the 90 days to Oct 6 2026, and we expect about +0.30% in the next 90 days. Stakers received 112.05M ADA of new coins from the protocol reserve, and holder-approved treasury payouts released 165.96M ADA more; only 417.8K ADA went back into the treasury as gifts. Cardano has no fee burn and no buyback, and its hard cap is 45B ADA.

The verdict, in one paragraph

Over the last 90 days ADA's circulating supply rose from 37.27B to 37.55B ADA, a net change of +0.74%. The monitor that tracks circulating supply read +0.74% as well, a gap of about 0.01 percentage points, far inside the 0.5-point line, so the Cardano page carries no warning chip. More than half of the 90-day growth came from the treasury rather than from staking. For the next 90 days only staking is booked, which is why the forecast drops to +0.30%. Our label: ADA is a steady staking-inflation coin whose treasury votes can add a large one-off push.

Sell pressure: where new ADA comes from

Protocol inflation — 112.05M ADA. At launch Cardano left a large share of the 45B ADA cap in a protocol reserve. Every five-day epoch the Cardano protocol takes 0.3% of what is still in that reserve, adds the transaction fees users paid, and splits the pot: one fifth goes to the treasury and the rest is paid to stake pools and the ADA holders who delegate to them. Rewards that cannot be paid out flow back into the reserve. Between Jul 8 and Oct 6 2026 the reserve fell from 6.26B to 6.08B ADA. The treasury took 66.4M ADA of that release, and stakers received 112.05M ADA, about 1.24M a day. We checked the figure a second way, by adding up the reward paid out in each of the 18 epochs and taking away the fees users paid in; the two methods agree within 0.02%. Because each payout is a share of a shrinking reserve, ADA issuance falls slowly, from about 6.4M per epoch at the start of the window to about 6.15M at the end. We book the next 90 days at the same 112.05M ADA.

Vesting unlocks — 0. ADA has no investor or team vesting schedule. The launch coins were handed out years ago, and the only ADA outside circulation today is the protocol reserve and the on-chain treasury.

Foundation and unscheduled unlocks — 165.96M ADA. The Cardano treasury lives on the ledger itself and pays out only when delegated representatives and the constitutional committee approve a withdrawal. Fourteen withdrawals were enacted between Jul 13 and Aug 17 2026. The largest, 120M ADA on Aug 17 2026, funds a 12-month program to grow DeFi liquidity on Cardano. The others paid for Intersect's governance work (25.4M ADA), Hydra, Mithril, developer tools, hardware wallet support and wallet teams. Once enacted, those coins leave the treasury and join the circulating float, even when the receiving contract pays them out slowly, so for ADA they are real new supply. Nothing is booked for the next 90 days. The one open request, 11.8M ADA, had under 4% support from representatives and expires on Oct 11 2026. And the spending cap holders agreed for Feb 13 2026 to about Jul 3 2027 is 500M ADA, of which 457.4M is already used, leaving only 42.6M ADA of room.

Long-term locked or bankruptcy — 0. No bankruptcy estate, court trustee or long lock is releasing ADA.

Buy pressure: where new ADA goes

Programmatic buyback — 0. Nothing buys ADA back. Cardano fees go into the staking reward pot and the treasury.

Protocol fee burn — 0. Cardano destroys no fees. Users paid 648,920 ADA in fees over the 90 days; that money was recycled into rewards and the treasury, so it is already netted out of the staking figure above.

Foundation buy — 0.No foundation, company or treasury program bought ADA in this window. The Cardano Foundation's latest yearly report showed it moving part of its reserve out of ADA and into bitcoin and cash.

New long-term lock — 0. About 21.27B ADAis delegated to stake pools, but delegation never leaves the owner's wallet and can be spent at any time, so it stays in the float.

Gifts back to the treasury — 417.8K ADA. Anyone can send ADA into the Cardano treasury, which takes it out of circulation. Two gifts made up nearly all of it: 70,346 ADA on Aug 2 2026 and 347,424 ADA on Aug 28 2026. Gifts follow no schedule, so none is booked for the next 90 days.

Foundation and overhang

The biggest overhang is the on-chain treasury: 1.37B ADA at the Oct 6 2026 epoch start, outside circulation and released only by votes. We read its balance at every rebuild, and the spending cap limits how much more can leave before about Jul 3 2027. The protocol reserve of 6.08B ADA is the other pool outside circulation, but it can only leave through the staking payouts above.

Several large holders sit inside circulation already. The Cardano Foundation's own reserve, Intersect's contracts that pay treasury grants out by milestone, and the 120M ADA DeFi program, whose next big release is gated at about month four (around mid-December 2026), are all counted as circulating. When they pay or sell, coins move between holders and no new supply appears; only a return to the treasury would change the ledger, as a buy. If the treasury balance falls between refreshes because of a new withdrawal, the outflow enters the treasury-payout row at the next refresh.

How ADA compares to other proof-of-stake Layer 1s

Cardano pays stakers from a fixed reserve inside a hard cap. That makes ADA issuance fall a little every epoch, the way a slow halving would, and it can never pass 45B ADA. Most proof-of-stake Layer 1s instead mint new coins without a cap: Ethereum pays validators new ETH and offsets part of it with a fee burn, and Solana pays from an inflation schedule that steps down each year and also burns part of its fees. ADA has the cap but no burn, so busier Cardano blocks do not shrink supply.

The treasury is what sets ADA apart. A fifth of every reward pot goes into a pot that holders control, and since 2025 that pot has paid out hundreds of millions of ADA by vote. Few large Layer 1s have an on-ledger treasury of this size, so for ADA a single governance decision, like the 120M ADA grant on Aug 17 2026, can move the 90-day supply number more than staking does.

What to watch in the next 90 days

Oct 11 2026: the 11.8M ADA treasury request expires unless support jumps from under 4%; if it were enacted it would land in the next 90 days.

Treasury cap: only 42.6M ADA is left under the 500M ADA limit to about Jul 3 2027. A vote to raise the cap again would reopen room for large payouts.

Mid-December 2026: the 120M ADA DeFi program reaches its month-four release gate. Paying out adds nothing new, but unused funds sent back to the treasury would count as a buy.

Next hard fork: developers are preparing the Dijkstra upgrade with no date set. Watch for any change to the 0.3% reserve rate or the one-fifth treasury share; a community draft to raise the first and cut the second has not reached a vote.

Summary

ADA supply grew +0.74% in 90 days and we expect about +0.30% next: Supply was growing · trend cooling. Stakers receive about 112M ADA of new coins every 90 days from a shrinking reserve, and voted treasury payouts added 166M ADA on top this time. The key risk is the treasury, which holds 1.37B ADA and can release large sums by vote. The ceiling is fixed: ADA can never pass 45B, and staking issuance shrinks a little every epoch.

MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of ADA, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Checked Oct 11 2026.