How Many ADA Tokens Are In Circulation?

Before speaking about the ADA tokens in circulation let’s first see how the PoS protocol operates. In a PoS protocol, staking the tokens is necessary to participate in the consensus mechanism. The coins are required to execute the protocol and a certain initial coin offering was initially required.

At that time, the concept of Initial Coin Offerings was extremely popular but there were many concerns that holding an ICO and selling them to the general public could fall under security regulations. IOHK that time chose to sell 25,927,070,538 ADA “vouchers” in a private sale in Japan and other Asian countries that were redeemable for ADA after the main net was launched in 2017.

BTC purists that only believe in that cryptocurrency, usually react adversely to the idea of a new form of money that Is created and sold. After the Bitcoin launch, Satoshi Nakamoto shared the code to run the BTC node publicly and allowed anyone to participate in the network consensus. While he had an advantage because only a few people knew about BTC, the fact that anyone could have participated made it fair.

The choice for Cardano’s private sale was a trade-off between geographical distribution and regular certainty where the second was chosen as a priority. At that time, 25,927,070,538 ADA were sold for $63 million to more than 10,000 people in the voucher sale between 2015 and 2017. According to the distribution audit which was held on behalf of the foundation, 94% of the ADA coins were sold to Japanese citizens, 2.56% to Koreans, 2.39% to Chinese, and the remaining to other citizens in Asian countries.

The other 5,185,414,108 ADA were distributed over IOHK and the Cardano Foundation. IOHK shared the ADA addresses and that one-third of the 2,463,071,701 ADA they received is now available with the rest being available in June 2018 and 2019. While the Foundation hasn’t really publicly shared their ADA address, it is believed that Emrugo held 2,074,163,643 ADA in this address and the Foundation held 648,176,763 ADA in the address. The remaining 13,887,515,354 ADA of the 45 billion coins that will ever exist, will be minted as block rewards.

The voucher sale did have a very limited geographical reach and in a PoS system stake equals power, distribution of the tokens is very important for the network to reach higher levels of decentralization. The principle is simple. All coin holders have to sell their coins to people that don’t own any and in Cardano’s case, the voucher sale was held at the start of the bull market between 2015 and 2017. When the mainnet was launched in 2017, all voucher sale participants received their ADA but the coin already increased in value. That way, the coins became tradeable on exchanges.