ATOM · the chain mints faster than its own label says.

Cosmos Hub pays staking rewards out of new ATOM, and the rate sits at its 10% ceiling because only 63.87% of the supply is bonded against a 67% target. The real rate is higher than the label. The chain mints a fixed slice each block against an assumption that a year holds 4,360,000 blocks, and it actually produced one every 5.72 seconds — about 5,514,000 a year, 26% more than assumed. Nothing in the protocol re-scales that number, so realised issuance runs at 12.65% a year: 16,223,214 ATOM over the window, paid to stakers.

Nothing is left to unlock. The 2017 fundraiser and the founding-entity allocations vested over two years and finished in 2021, and the unlock trackers show Cosmos Hub fully unlocked with no scheduled events. There is no escrow contract on the Hub holding a locked tranche, so there is no calendar entitlement and no undrawn backlog to read. Every ATOM that exists today is already free to move.

Four overhangs are tracked, all read at both ends of the window. The community pool holds 10,730,834.56 ATOM and can only be spent by a passed vote; the one spend that passed here paid a bridged asset, not ATOM, so the pool released nothing and simply accrued. Staking rewards earned but not yet withdrawn sit at 15,092,708.11 ATOM. The parked base-fee account holds 59,728.01 ATOM. The Interchain Foundation and Cosmos Labs treasuries are the fourth, and publish no wallet address, so their size is known only from their own disclosures. Every one of them rose or held; none released. No public evidence of release in window — monitored.

There is no estate. Cosmos Hub has never been through an insolvency, no trustee holds ATOM on a court-ordered distribution schedule, and no creditor pool is being released into the market. The 15,226,032 ATOM currently unbonding is not this row either — those coins were always counted as tradable and are simply moving between staking states.

Cosmos Hub does not buy its own token. A buyback funded by consumer-chain fees has been discussed on the governance forum since 2024, but the draft was never finished and never submitted for a vote, so no contract exists and no address receives repurchases. Coverage published in August 2026 describing a live fee-driven buyback does not match the chain: the mint settings are untouched and supply kept rising through the window. Monitored.

Gas is not burned on Cosmos Hub. Base fees are switched to non-distributing, which looks like a burn until you read the account: the collector holding them grew from 56,188.53 to 59,728.01 ATOM across the window, so those coins are parked, not destroyed. The rest of the fee stream is paid out to stakers and the community pool. One burn path is live and it is a small one: a proposal rejected with veto forfeits its 500 ATOM deposit, and five spam proposals were vetoed inside the window, destroying 2,500 ATOM. That is 0.0005% of supply — real, measured, and far too small to offset the mint.

No entity behind Cosmos Hub disclosed an open-market ATOM purchase with a date and a size inside this window. The Interchain Foundation funds development from a treasury it already holds rather than accumulating on exchanges, and neither it nor Cosmos Labs published a buy programme. No public evidence of release in window — monitored.

Staking is not a lock, and this page will not count it as one. The 337,473,301 ATOM bonded today is inside the tradable count: it unbonds in 21 days, it needs no permission to leave, and it is exactly what the circulating figure already includes. It also earns the new coins booked on the sell side, so treating it as absorbed supply would count the same tokens twice. No lock-up contract, no vote-escrow module and no announced staking cap exists on the Hub.