A hard cap.
And a gentler road.
15,000,000,000 ATON, fixed. The mining reward falls by about 1.43 percent every month, which works out to a halving every four years over roughly the same lifetime as Bitcoin, without there ever being one block where the floor moves.
There is no public sale and there will not be one. Four fifths of the supply is mined and the remaining fifth is allocated, vested and disclosed below rather than described as a rounding error.
- Max supply
- 15,000,000,000
- hard cap, fixed
- Monthly decay
- 1.43%
- compounding, never a step
- After four years
- ×0.501
- 0.18% off an exact half
- Public sale
- None
- mining or the open market
Where the supply goes
Four numbers, in tokens rather than percentages
A percentage is easy to nod along to. The same figure written out in tokens is harder to skim past, which is the reason it is written out.
Emitted over the full curve, split across both lanes
Four year linear vest behind a twelve month cliff
Multisig held, released against milestones or by governance
Locked for market making at listing, not sold to anyone
| Year | Mined by then | Share of the cap | Issued that month |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 5,989,237,605 | 39.9% | 86.0M |
| 8 | 8,989,227,953 | 59.9% | 43.1M |
| 12 | 10,491,913,717 | 69.9% | 21.6M |
| 20 | 11,621,624,664 | 77.5% | 5.4M |
| 32 | 11,952,448,112 | 79.7% | 679,992 |
Computed from the model rather than typed into the page. The first month issues 171,600,000 ATON and every month after that issues 98.57 percent of the one before it.
Why a curve and not a cliff
Two lanes cannot both take a fifty percent cut at once
Bitcoin halves its reward at a fixed block height. It is a clean story, it has worked for fifteen years, and it is a cliff: on one block the economics of mining change by half. Miners running thin margins go off, hashrate drops, and the network absorbs it.
Atheron has two independent lanes with separate hardware and separate cost structures. Cutting both in half in the same block risks pushing whichever lane is more marginal at that moment under the line, while the balance dampener that keeps the two lanes honest is trying to absorb the shock at the same time. Two mechanisms fighting over the same moment is how you find out about an interaction you did not model.
Decaying 1.43 percent a month reaches the same place. After four years the reward is 0.501 of what it was, which is 0.18 percent off an exact half and close enough that the familiar description holds. Over about 132 years it runs through the same number of halving equivalents as Bitcoin. It simply never has a day when the floor moves under anybody.
The supply number, and the argument against it
This part is usually skipped, so here it is. For a given network valuation, the price of one coin is the market cap divided by the supply. A smaller supply gives a higher price per coin at the same valuation. That is arithmetic and no protocol decision alters it.
What it does not alter is how much value the network captures or what any holder's share is worth. One percent of a twenty-one-million-supply chain and one percent of a fifteen-billion-supply chain are worth precisely the same at the same market cap. Anyone telling you a low supply makes a token more valuable is describing a feeling rather than an equation.
The feeling is still real, though, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. A per-coin price that reads as premium carries cultural weight that a number with several leading zeroes does not, at identical market caps. Fifteen billion is the higher-supply side of that trade and we took it knowingly, because a supply large enough to pay a mining network for a century without fractions everywhere was worth more to us than the optics.