emission schedule

An emission schedule is the pre-planned rate at which a protocol creates and hands out brand-new tokens over time. Where vesting governs how already-allocated tokens unlock, emissions govern how fresh supply enters existence — the new coins paid to miners, validators, liquidity providers, or stakers as a reward for securing or using the network. The schedule is essentially the protocol's monetary policy written in advance and, often, in code.

Schedules come in distinct shapes. Bitcoin's is famously disinflationary and fixed: the block subsidy starts at 50 BTC and halves every 210,000 blocks (roughly every four years), so issuance steps down 50, 25, 12.5, 6.25, and asymptotically approaches a hard cap of 21 million coins. Ethereum after the Merge has no fixed schedule at all; issuance to validators scales roughly with the square root of the total amount staked, and the EIP-1559 fee burn runs against it, so the net supply change floats with usage and can even turn negative. Other designs use smooth decay curves, fixed linear emissions, or governance-adjustable rates.

The schedule is one of the most consequential design choices a protocol makes, because it sets the trade-off between security and dilution. Emissions are how a network pays for its own security and bootstraps participation (liquidity mining is just front-loaded emissions to attract capital), but every newly minted token dilutes existing holders unless real demand absorbs it. A generous early schedule can rent activity that evaporates the moment rewards taper. The honest questions to ask of any schedule are: how much new supply per year, who receives it, whether the rate declines or runs forever, and what the protocol is actually buying with that issuance.