RAY Inflation Analysis · September 2026 · Mixed flows · supply roughly steady
RAY supply is roughly steady: Raydium's reward programme moved 525,000 RAY into the market over the last 90 days, nothing was taken off, and net supply grew +0.19% — with about the same expected over the next 90 days. The Raydium fee buyback bought 4.49M RAY in the same window, but it keeps those coins in a wallet that already counts as circulating, so the buyback does not shrink the float. No new RAY can ever be minted: every coin comes out of the 555M made at launch, and about 285.14M of them still sit outside the market.
The verdict, in one paragraph
Over the 90 days to Sep 30 2026, RAY's sell side was 525,000 RAY and its buy side was 0, against 269.86M RAY in circulation — a net change of +0.19%, and +0.19% projected for the next 90 days. The monitor, which tracks the circulating count day by day, reads +0.09% for the same stretch. The gap is 0.10 percentage points, well inside our half-point tolerance, so no warning chip is shown. The two readings agree that RAY is a quiet-supply token: a small, steady reward stream on one side, and on the other a large fee buyback that holds its coins rather than removing them.
Sell pressure: where new RAY comes from
Protocol inflation is the only live sell row, at 525,000 RAY. The RAY mint key is switched off on-chain, so Raydium cannot create new coins; instead, staking and farm rewards are paid from a release wallet that sits outside the circulating count. In this window that wallet sent 200,000 RAY on Aug 10 2026, 200,000 RAY on Sep 10 2026 and 125,000 RAY on Sep 28 2026 into the reward pool, and each transfer showed up as a step up in the circulating count within a day. The Raydium docs describe the mining reserve emissions as roughly 1.9M RAY a year, and the staking pool alone pays out about 3,610 RAY a day, so the 90-day figure sits in line with the programme. The release wallet now holds only 254,373 RAY, so keeping this pace will need a top-up from the mining reserve; the forward figure holds the trailing rate.
Vesting unlocks are 0. The RAY team and seed allocations finished their vesting on Feb 21 2024, and no unlock tracker lists any cliff or linear release still to come. Foundation and unscheduled unlocks are also 0: the five project vaults holding the unreleased RAY did not move at all in the window. Long-term locked or bankruptcy is 0 — there is no estate, trustee or time-lock with RAY to hand back.
Buy pressure: where new RAY goes
Programmatic buyback books 0, even though it is Raydium's biggest supply mechanism by far. Twelve per cent of every trading fee on Raydium's pools buys RAY on the open market, and the buyback wallet grew from 82.98M to 87.46M RAY in the window — 4.49M RAYbought and none sold, with most of it in September as meme-stock and tokenized-stock trading pushed Raydium's fees sharply higher. The wallet now holds about a third of all circulating RAY. But the bought RAY is kept, not burned or locked, and the wallet is already inside the circulating count; buying coins into it moves them from one holder to another without shrinking the float. If Raydium ever burns or locks that pile, this row would become the largest number on the page.
Protocol fee burn is 0: Raydium has no fee burn, and since launch only about 2,604 RAY have been destroyed in total, all by users. Foundation buy is 0 — beyond the fee buyback, nobody buys RAY for the project, and the treasury share of CLMM and CPMM fees is kept in dollar stablecoins. New long-term lock is 0: about 37.31M RAY is staked, but RAY staking has no lock period and staked RAY stays in the circulating count.
Foundation and overhang
The RAY overhang is large and has been still for a long time. Five Raydium allocation vaults outside the circulating count hold 282.66M RAY: the partnership and ecosystem fund with 138.59M (last moved in Sep 2023), the mining reserve with 123.32M (last moved in Feb 2024), advisors with 11.10M, team with 7.30M (last moved in Feb 2024) and community and seed with 2.35M. The reward release wallet adds 254,373 RAY, and about 2.22M more RAY sits outside the count in wallets we could not name. None of these vaults has a published release date, so their row stays at zero until coins actually move.
The buyback wallet, holding 87.46M RAY, is watched separately. It sits inside the circulating count, so selling from it would add nothing new to supply, but a burn from it would open a buy row. We re-read every one of these balances at each rebuild: if any vault's balance falls between checks, the outflow enters the unscheduled-unlock row at the next refresh.
How RAY compares to other DEX tokens with fee buybacks
Most exchange tokens that turn fees into buying pressure fall into two groups. One group burns what it buys — PancakeSwap's CAKE is the best-known DEX example — so every purchase lowers total supply and shows up directly as a buy row. The other group buys and holds, like Hyperliquid's HYPE, whose fee fund keeps the tokens it purchases. RAY belongs to the second group: Raydium's buyback is large and automatic, but it ends in a wallet the market still counts, so the supply effect depends on what Raydium decides to do with the pile, not on the buying itself.
On the sell side, RAY is closer to a fixed-supply token than to a chain coin with open-ended issuance. The mint is disabled, so RAY cannot inflate past its 555M cap the way uncapped proof-of-stake coins can; new float can only come from the pre-made reserves. That makes RAY's real supply risk the 282.66M in project vaults — more than the whole circulating float — rather than any emission curve.
What to watch in the next 90 days
First, a top-up of the reward release wallet from the mining reserve: at the current pace its 254,373 RAY lasts about six weeks, and the first move out of the mining reserve since Feb 25 2024 would be worth noting. Second, any Raydium announcement to burn or lock the 87.46M RAY buyback pile, which would turn the buyback into real buy pressure overnight. Third, the fee level itself: 12% of fees sets the buyback size, and September's surge came from meme-stock and tokenized-stock launches that may cool. Fourth, any movement from the partnership and ecosystem fund, still-untouched since Sep 2023. None of these has a date, so the coin page lists no dated event for the next 90 days.
Summary
RAY supply grew +0.19%over the last 90 days and is projected to grow about the same next, as Raydium's reward programme released 525,000 RAY into the market. The fee buyback bought 4.49M RAY but holds it in a wallet already counted as circulating, so it takes nothing off the market while the pile grows to about a third of the float. RAY can never be minted, which caps supply at 555M, but 282.66M RAY still sits in project vaults with no release date — that overhang, not new issuance, is the key supply risk to watch.
MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of RAY, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Checked Sep 30 2026.