DOT · a hard cap, and nothing that removes a coin.

Polkadot has no mining and no halving. New DOT is minted by the protocol on a schedule governance rewrote on Mar 14 2026: a permanent 2.1B ceiling, and each two-year step issues 13.14% of the gap still left to it. That cut issuance 53.6% overnight. Reading the supply counter on the chain that now holds every DOT balance, 13.99M DOT were created over 90 days — about 3.36% a year — and the step does not change again until Mar 2028. After a Jun 12 2026 upgrade moved payouts into an allocation buffer, the measured pace settled at 153,192 DOT a day, which projects to 13.79M for the next 90 days and matches the curve written into the live code to within 0.04%.

There is no unlock calendar for DOT and no cliff. On-chain vesting schedules do exist — 1,047 accounts holding 30.56M DOT — but those coins were minted years ago and are already inside the counted float, so a release moves them between wallets rather than adding supply. The locked total also rose across the window, from 29.88M, so nothing is draining. Unlock trackers publish a monthly DOT vesting line running to Mar 2028; that is the protocol's own issuance schedule relabelled, and it is already carried in row 1.

Three protocol-controlled pools hold DOT with no fixed release date, and all three were read directly at both ends of the window: the on-chain Treasury at 24.31M DOT, the new allocation buffer at 3.09M, and the validator reward pots at 33.9K. The buffer is the one to watch — it was empty on May 24 2026 and filled to 3.09M once the Jun 12 2026 upgrade began routing a 32.2% share of issuance into it instead of paying it out. All three ended larger than they started, so no outflow is booked. No Foundation wallet set is published, so there is no separate entity balance to read.

Polkadot has no bankruptcy estate and no trustee distribution. The network launched from a public sale in 2017 and has never been through an insolvency, so this row can only be zero.

Polkadot runs no buyback of any kind. Transaction fees, coretime sales and slashed stake are all routed into a governance-controlled allocation buffer, never into a contract that buys DOT on the open market, and no vote has proposed one. There is no buyback wallet to watch.

This is the row that changed, and it is why DOT has no downward lever at all. Polkadot used to destroy unspent treasury funds at the end of every 24-day spend period; the burn setting in the live code now reads empty, and the Mar 2026 vote sent fees, coretime revenue and slashed stake into the allocation buffer instead of destroying them. We read the supply counter at both ends of the window and at fourteen points in between, and it only ever rose — not one DOT was destroyed in 90 days.

No Foundation or Labs entity has disclosed a DOT purchase programme, and no entity wallet set is published to sweep. The only identified pools on the chain are protocol accounts, and every one of them took in DOT rather than buying it. Nothing to book.

Staking is not a lock here, and it stopped resembling one in April 2026. Nominators became unslashable and their exit was cut to two eras — about two days — while the ordinary bond still reads 28. Bonded DOT is already inside the counted float either way, so a larger stake removes nothing from the market. No new lockup contract was deployed in the window.