IOST tokenomics: supply, issuance and who holds the coins

IOST tokenomics comes down to three facts. The supply has grown well beyond the 21 billion IOST that existed at launch. IOST 3.0 added a second, large pool of tokens on BNB Chain that will keep being released for years. And a handful of accounts, mostly exchanges, hold most of the coins on the original chain. The details are messier than any single headline number, so this guide takes them one at a time.

How many IOST exist?

There is no single answer, because IOST now lives on two networks. The original L1 chain, running since February 2019, has a native token with a hard cap of 90 billion IOST. When we read the chain’s own token data, about 32.6 billion of those had been minted. Separately, the BEP-20 IOST contract on BNB Chain, deployed for IOST 3.0 on 8 March 2025, reported a total supply of about 22.4 billion. That includes the 21.32 billion new tokens issued for the IOST 3.0 launch.

Then there are the aggregators. CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap both list a circulating supply of roughly 36.7 billion IOST, and CoinMarketCap shows a total supply of about 49.2 billion. Neither explains how it gets those numbers. The table below puts all six figures side by side. They move over time, so treat them as approximate and check the IOST explorer for the L1 numbers.

Why the supply figures don’t reconcile

If you add the L1 supply to the BNB Chain supply, you get about 55 billion IOST. That is not a real number, for three reasons. First, some tokens exist on both sides. When IOST moves from the L1 to BNB Chain through the iBridge, the L1 coins are held in a custody account while BEP-20 tokens are released on BNB Chain. The L1 account swap_total holds about 1.1 billion IOST, which roughly matches the BEP-20 supply above the 21.32 billion issuance. That looks like the bridge reserve, though we could not confirm it officially.

Second, most of the 21.32 billion new tokens are not in circulation yet. They sit in vesting schedules that run from 12 months up to 60 months, so they reach the market gradually. Third, the aggregators clearly apply their own rules. CoinGecko’s 36.7 billion is close to the L1 supply plus a slice of already-released BNB Chain tokens, but that is our guess, not a published method. CoinMarketCap’s 49.2 billion total supply fits no simple sum we could find.

One more open question: the 90 billion cap belongs to the L1 token contract. We found no official explanation of whether BEP-20 issuance counts toward it. If you see a site quoting a precise “IOST supply” to the last coin, ask which chain and which method it uses. Our view is that the L1 figure, the BNB Chain figure and the vesting schedule together tell the real story, and the aggregator number is a rough summary of them. For how the two networks fit together, see IOST 3.0 explained.

The IOST 3.0 allocation: 21.32 billion new tokens

The single biggest change to IOST’s supply came with IOST 3.0. The plan, approved in a second governance vote on 12 January 2025 and launched on 8 March 2025, created 21.32 billion new IOST on BNB Chain. That is roughly as many tokens as existed at genesis. The official economic model splits them into six buckets, each with its own release schedule.

Node rewards take the largest share, 60%, released over 60 months. The documents call these PayPIN node rewards, and press coverage called them validator rewards. Airdrops and StakeDrops take 20% over 48 months. That covers the 1.7056 billion IOST airdrop, split equally between L1 holders with at least 1,000 IOST and exchange users, paid out over 48 months from the 15 March 2025 snapshot. It also covers 1.4924 billion IOST for two StakeDrop seasons. Our IOST airdrop guide and staking guide explain how holders receive them.

The rest is smaller. PayFi community incentives get 8% and developer grants 5%, each over 36 months. The Nexus DAO gets 4% over 48 months, described as operational funds and a pool for quarterly burn votes. We found no public dashboard or contract showing that DAO in action. The team gets 3%, locked for 12 months and then released over 36 months. In practice, this means new IOST reaches the market every month for years. Unless demand grows, a steady release like that weighs on the price, as our IOST price history shows for 2025 and 2026.

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Inflation: 2% a year, or an annual halving?

The official documents contradict each other here, and we would rather say so than pick one. The L1 developer documentation describes 2% yearly issuance, compounding. Half goes to block producers as block rewards, and half goes to voting rewards, split between nodes and voters. The same economic-model page also mentions the foundation issuing 1% to reward community contributors, which would take the total closer to 3%. The newer IOST 3.0 documents say something else: an initial supply of 21 billion IOST, with block rewards paid in an annual halving format. Those two models cannot both describe the same chain.

The chain itself agrees with neither. Starting from 21 billion at the 2019 launch, 2% compounding for about 7.7 years would give roughly 24.5 billion IOST. Even 3% would give about 26.4 billion. The L1 actually reports about 32.6 billion. So either extra issuance happened at some point, or the parameters changed with no clear documentation. The live block-reward transaction also issues around 5.09 IOST per block, more than the roughly 3.3 IOST the docs describe. Our honest summary: the L1 supply grows by a few percent a year at least, the BNB Chain supply grows as vesting releases new tokens, and the documented inflation rate is not reliable.

IOST burns: what has actually been destroyed

IOST has burn mechanics, but they are small next to issuance. On the L1, the protocol burns the 2% fee charged when you buy RAM, and gas consumed by transactions is destroyed rather than paid to anyone. With very low everyday activity on the chain, those burns are tiny. The L1 burn account deadaddr holds about 1.16 million IOST.

The one large, documented burn came on 8 September 2026, when the foundation announced it had burned 70 million IOST from the legacy ERC-20 issuance. The old ERC-20 contract still reports a total supply of 21 billion, which suggests the tokens were sent to a dead address rather than removed by the contract. For scale, 70 million is about 0.3% of the 21.32 billion IOST 3.0 issuance. The price jumped about threefold the next day and then gave the move back within days. The IOST 3.0 documents also describe MEV burns, ecosystem burns and quarterly DAO-voted burns, projected at about $8 million a year by the end of 2025. With Layer 2 usage near zero, we found nothing to support that projection.

Top holders: how concentrated is IOST?

The L1 rich list on IOSTSCAN shows about 641,700 accounts holding IOST, but ownership is very concentrated. When we checked, the top 10 accounts held about 72% of the L1 supply. The top 20 held about 82%, the top 50 about 93% and the top 100 nearly 97%. That looks alarming, but most of those top accounts are exchange custody wallets, which hold coins for many customers at once.

The largest single account is dunamuiost, with roughly 9.7 billion IOST, about 30% of the L1 supply. The name points to Dunamu, the company that operates the Korean exchange Upbit. It is very likely Upbit’s custody account for the IOST its users hold, not one person’s stash. That fits what we know about the market: Upbit has run a KRW market since 2018 and is one of the two biggest IOST venues. In other words, a large share of IOST belongs to Korean retail traders through one exchange. See IOST in South Korea and our Upbit review for that side of the story.

One exchange, a third of the chain

The dunamuiost account linked to Upbit’s operator holds roughly 30% of L1 IOST on behalf of its users.

The second-largest account is the open question. how9keb7u holds about 8.1 billion IOST, roughly 25% of the L1 supply, and carries no public label. We could not identify its owner. After that come several accounts that look like exchanges or infrastructure: swap_total, likely the bridge reserve; iost_ok115, possibly OKX; gateiohot, labelled as Gate; and a group of bkiost0x accounts that probably belong to Bitkub. These labels come from account names, not confirmed disclosures.

Two practical lessons follow. First, exchange custody is not the same as decentralization. If one exchange freezes withdrawals or changes its listing, a large part of the supply is affected at once. Second, the unlabelled whale is a real unknown. It could be a fund, a foundation-linked wallet or another custodian. We could not check holder concentration for BEP-20 IOST on BNB Chain, so this picture covers the L1 only. You can look up any account yourself in the IOST explorer, and our IOST risk guide puts concentration alongside the other red flags.