Max Supply

Max supply is the highest number of coins a protocol will ever create, written into its own rules — Bitcoin's cap of 21 million is the best-known example. It differs from total supply, which counts everything issued so far minus what has been burned, and from circulating supply, which counts only what is freely tradable today. A hard cap makes future issuance predictable and is often described as digital scarcity, though scarcity alone does not determine an asset's value or price. Some networks, including Ethereum, have no fixed maximum and instead manage issuance through ongoing rewards and fee burning. Because the limit is a protocol rule rather than a promise, changing it would require a fork that the network agrees to adopt.