Glossary

The best-known amount of alpha this subnet has destroyed for good, valued in TAO. Most of it is not somebody choosing to burn tokens: it is miner rewards the chain destroys automatically, block after block.

Two overlapping sources, neither complete on its own: the chain-wide counter covers every burn path but only exists since 2026-05-28, while the explicit-burn total reaches back to genesis and is blind to the other paths. Taking the larger is a lower bound, not the real total: the two cover different periods AND different paths, so on a subnet with burns in both they under-count. Read the size before reading intent: most subnets carry a non-zero figure here, and on the large majority it is dominated by the miner incentive the chain destroys every block when a subnet directs its rewards at its own neurons (which is why several unrelated subnets show nearly identical totals). Deliberate burns, the ones somebody actually called, are rare. Burning is not recycling: a burn destroys the tokens while leaving both the alpha held outside the pool and the issuance counter untouched, whereas recycling reduces both, and recycled alpha is not counted here. Both sources are keyed to the subnet number rather than to the subnet, and the chain never clears them when a number is freed and handed to a new subnet, so a young subnet used to display the burns of whoever held its number before. Since 2026-08-04 that inherited part is measured at the exact block each subnet was registered and removed from both terms, so this figure is the current occupant's own burns. It was worth up to everything: two subnets were showing six-figure burns they had never made, and eight were showing an explicit-burn total that was entirely their predecessor's.

All the alpha in circulation for this subnet: what sits in the pool plus what is held outside it.

Burned alpha is deliberately NOT removed here: on-chain a burn destroys the tokens but leaves the outside-the-pool figure untouched, and it is tracked separately (see Burned). Market cap, by contrast, does remove it, which is why supply × price sits above market cap on burn-heavy subnets. Recycled alpha IS already excluded, because recycling does reduce that figure, and the issuance counter with it. Supply and market cap both stop at those two stocks, leaving out the protocol alpha reserve that the chain folds into its own issuance figure (see Root Proportion): liquidity waiting to be injected, owned by nobody, and zero on every subnet today. Note that "held outside the pool" is not the same as "staked by holders": it also contains the orphaned alpha of past burns and alpha the protocol bought through chain buys. Root is a special case, since its alpha IS TAO, so the figure is served while its two components are not. Explorers that also net burns, or that show the 21M cap (which is the FDV base), will differ.