Siacoin Total Supply
The total supply of Siacoins (SC) is unlimited; there will never be a cap on the number of Siacoins generated. Humans produce an extensive amount of data, making it practically limitless. When Sia becomes the industry-standard storage layer of the internet, the network will require a significant quantity of Siacoins to fulfill all the associated contracts.
As of March 23, 2021, approximately 47.3 billion coins have been created, with the new coin introduction slowing down as each new block is produced. By 2022, an estimated 50 billion coins should be in circulation.
Additionally, miners would lose their incentive to continue providing services to the network if the block reward were to cease.
Creation of new Siacoins
New Siacoins are created through proof-of-work mining. Over 40 billion Siacoins are circulating, which will continue to increase. Sia is poised to become the foundational storage layer of the internet, necessitating billions of Siacoins to accommodate the petabytes and exabytes of data that will be stored on our platform.
The number of Siacoins created for each block is 300,000 minus the height. This means a block with a block height of 200,000 has created 100,000 Siacoins. After a height of 270,000, the block reward won't get lower, and all blocks will have a reward of 30,000 Siacoins.
Supply structure changes
Sia version 1.5.4 introduced a network hard fork, which, in turn, established the Sia Foundation—an emerging non-profit organization dedicated to supporting, developing, and promoting the Sia network. The Sia Foundation led to a minor alteration in the supply structure since it received continuous funding through a block subsidy of 30,000 Siacoins per block, disbursed every 4,380 blocks. Additionally, the hard fork included an initial offering of approximately 1.57 billion Siacoins to kickstart the Foundation's operations and finance its initial development and activities.
Consequently, this resulted in a slight, temporary increase in the inflation schedule for a single year, with an uptick of a few percentage points, before swiftly returning to nearly pre-fork levels.
Siacoin inflation
Inflation is an inherent feature of Siacoin designed to accommodate various factors that lead to the gradual reduction of coins in circulation. These factors include the coins locked in contracts as collateral, lost coins, coins burnt due to failed hosting contracts. Over time, this inflation diminishes significantly, yet it plays a crucial role in safeguarding the network by offering block rewards to miners.
| Year | % Growth in total Siacoins |
|---|---|
1 | 90 |
2 | 39 |
3 | 21 |
4 | 11.6 |
5 | 4.6 |
6 (Foundation year) | 9.9 |
7 | 6.3 |
8 | 5.9 |
9 | 5.6 |
10 | 5.3 |
20 | 2.3 |
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