How Algorand Tradeable Supply is calculated?

Greeting Algorand community!

I am Leo and am new to the community. I am doing my own research on the economics of Algorand network and have a question regarding the token supply. (I’ve read Algorand white paper and https://algorand.foundation/the-algo/algo-dynamics/ too).

On Algoexplorer site, there is one chart about tradeable supply . Could anyone explain to me how the number is calculated? If I want to build realtime graph of this metric (1min time window for example instead of 1d), what’s the easiest data source I could pull from? I took a look at the API V1/V2 and Indexer API V2, but couldn’t find the corresponding API for this data.

Thanks ahead!

@Leo,

Your question is a good one, and I believe that you should looks for the answer on the algoexplorer.io site itself.

Most of the participants in this forum are from the Algorand Foundation and the Algorand Inc, so I don’t know if they would be able to provide any concrete answers. The algoexplorer website is developed and maintained by RandLabs, and they are likely to be able to give you a conclusive answer.

One thing you might want to look at is the goal ledger supply -d . command, which might produce output similar to the following:

Round: 11965451
Total Money: 10124827148046348 microAlgos
Online Money: 8077483313467671 microAlgos

I don’t know if using the above would result in the same metrics as reported by algoexplorer.io or not.

mainnet

goal ledger supply
Round: 11717889
Total Money: 3777879844157792 microAlgos
Online Money: 2250396521053388 microAlgos

…which corresponds to this API:

Thanks @tsachi and @aojjazz for your responses! online money was my first guess too but it turns out to be different than tradable supply metric.


As above screenshots show: online money is larger than tradeable supply by a considerable scale.

My current hypothesis is tradeable supply has manually subtracted various wallet addresses publicly published by Algorand Fundation as locked wallet address or reserve wallet address.

I like this metric better than online money or circulating supply because this reflects the actual participating supply in the liquid market. Though if my hypothesis is correct, this metric is subject to be manipulated easily by third parties if it’s not baked into the blockchain API layer.

A couple of comments:

  • Online Algos just mean that the Algos participate in the consensus protocol. You see that online-money from the API actually matches online stake on algoexplorer.io
  • More precisely, addresses can be either online (participate in the consensus and receive participation rewards), offline (default state, receive participation rewards but do not participate in the consensus), non-participating (a special state that you can see as locked / non-circulating at all and that do not receive participation rewards).

The total money is amount of ALGO out of genesis. All of it is technically ‘spendable.’ While a bunch might be contractually or ‘effectively’ locked in some way (multisig that the parties don’t have all the keys to), it’s technically ‘out’ and at least on-chain, not locked in any way. Online money is as Fabrice mentioned, balance of accounts marked as online, and eligible to participate in consensus.

So IMO, ‘circulating’ should be the full 3.7B number. It’s what actually determines the cost to attack the chain in a proof of stake system.