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 from the date the chain introduced it, while the explicit-burn total reaches back to genesis and misses the other paths. Taking the larger gives a lower bound, not the real total, since the two cover different periods and different paths. Read the size before reading intent: most of it is the miner incentive the chain destroys every block when a subnet directs its rewards at its own neurons (which is why unrelated subnets can show nearly identical totals), and 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 passes to a new subnet, so the part inherited from an earlier holder is measured at the block each subnet was registered and removed from both terms: this figure is the current occupant's own burns.

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, removes it, along with the alpha the protocol itself holds, 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.