XTZ · the mint gets smaller as more people stake.
XTZ is the token of Tezos, a proof-of-stake chain that upgrades itself by vote — 1.09B circulating and no supply cap. Staking rewards are the only way a new coin can exist.
Sell pressure. One stream: 8.22M XTZ minted as staking rewards. The chain sets that rate itself and cut it from 3.20% to 2.97% a year as more supply was staked.
Buy pressure. Only 59.3K XTZ destroyed — and the biggest slice of it, 30.0K, was six lost rollup dispute bonds rather than fees.
Tezos sets its own staking-reward rate from how much of the supply is staked, inside a fixed band. The rate fell from 3.20% to 2.97% a year across the quarter as the staked share climbed to 30.8%, and the chain's own mint counter shows 8,218,269 XTZ created. That is the entire new-supply story — there is no other issuance path.
The 2018 four-year vesting schedule for the Foundation and the early team finished on Sep 17 2022 and cannot restart. The vesting contracts it ran through are empty and the allocation is physically spent.
No public evidence of release in window — monitored. We swept every transaction touching all 14 identified Tezos Foundation wallets: thirteen had none at all, and the fourteenth had a single 8.54 XTZ payment coming in. The four Foundation bakers hold 32.8M XTZ and ten Foundation delegator wallets hold 50.3M XTZ, about 7.6% of the float, on no published release plan. Their balances rose 1.01M over the quarter, which is baking reward accrual, not buying.
There is no bankruptcy estate and no trustee distributing XTZ on a court schedule. Nothing here can fire.
19,981,067 XTZ of 2017 fundraiser allocations have still never been claimed, and any original participant can claim theirs at any time with no expiry. One claim of 4,588 XTZ landed on Jul 28 2026. Over the past twelve months there were eleven claims totalling 82,913 XTZ, so the quarter ahead carries the trailing-year average rather than this window's single firing.
Tezos runs no buyback of any kind. Transaction fees are paid straight to bakers as income rather than funding a repurchase contract, and no governance proposal to change that exists.
Storing data on Tezos destroys XTZ at a fixed price per byte, which removed about 200 XTZ a day, or 17,992 over the quarter. Set against a mint of 8.22M, ordinary chain use gives back roughly one XTZ in every 457 created.
No public evidence of release in window — monitored. The same transfer sweep that cleared the sell side shows no identified Foundation wallet bought XTZ on the open market during the quarter.
Staking absorbed 16.39M XTZ over the quarter, and none of it counts here: unstaking takes days, not years, and staked XTZ is still counted as circulating. It is custody, not a lock.
Operators of the Etherlink rollup post a 10,000 XTZ bond to publish, and lose it if they are proven wrong. Six disputes were lost inside this window, half of each bond destroyed — 30,000 XTZ, which out-burned the whole fee mechanism. It appears in no tokenomics page and on no calendar, and it carries forward at zero because nothing schedules it.
Another 11,337 XTZ was sent to an unspendable address and permanently removed. Every single transfer came from one place — the protocol's own liquidity-baking exchange contract — so this is mechanical, not people choosing to destroy coins.
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