Where every lumen lives: XLM supply, decoded

There are about 50.0 billion Stellar Lumens in existence today, and roughly 35.25 billion of them count as XLM circulating supply. Nearly all of the remaining ~14.75 billion sit in accounts controlled by the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), plus a small upgrade reserve and the network’s locked fee pool. XLM has no max supply cap in the protocol, so CoinGecko lists “max supply” as none, even though no new lumens are being created. The live supply donut above shows the current split.

That ~50 billion figure is the result of three big decisions: 100 billion lumens created at launch, a 1% annual inflation that ran until 2019, and a one-off burn of more than half the supply the same year. Below we walk through each step, show exactly where today’s lumens sit, explain why CoinGecko and SDF’s dashboard sometimes differ, and look at what all this means for price.

Stellar Lumens total supply vs circulating vs max supply

Three numbers get mixed up all the time, so let’s pin them down.

Total supply is every lumen that exists and can still be spent. SDF’s lumen dashboard put it at 50,001,786,837 XLM at our latest check. Burned lumens are excluded.

Circulating supply is the part of the total that is in public hands: total supply minus SDF’s mandate holdings, the upgrade reserve and the fee pool. The dashboard showed 35,251,438,395 XLM. CoinGecko’s figure differed by fewer than 100 lumens. This is the number market cap is calculated from.

Max supply is the ceiling a protocol enforces. Bitcoin has one. Stellar doesn’t: inflation was disabled by a validator vote rather than removed for good, so no fixed cap is written into the protocol. That is why CoinGecko leaves the field empty, and why our widget shows a dash there. If you see “max supply: 50 billion” somewhere, read it as “total supply today”, not as a guarantee.

From 100 billion to 50 billion: XLM supply history

Stellar launched in July 2014 with 100 billion lumens, then called “stellars”, created in one go at genesis. Nobody mined them. Stripe, which provided seed funding, received 2% of that initial supply, and SDF was given authority over the rest to grow the network through giveaways, grants and partnerships.

From launch until 2019 the protocol also had inflation: 1% new lumens a year. In practice most holders claimed their share by joining “inflation pools” that collected the payouts and shared them out, which produced a flood of tiny payments. By the time it was switched off, inflation had created 5,443,902,087 XLM, according to SDF’s developer docs.

Then came two changes within a week. On 28 October 2019, validators adopted Protocol 12, which disabled inflation through CAP-26. On 4 November 2019, SDF burned 55,442,095,285.74 XLM. The arithmetic now adds up neatly: 100 billion + ~5.44 billion of inflation − ~55.44 billion burned ≈ 50.0 billion total supply.

The 2019 Stellar lumens burn, explained

The burn was SDF’s decision to shrink its own holdings. Coverage at the time, including Decrypt’s report, described it as roughly 5 billion lumens from SDF’s operating fund and 50 billion from its giveaway programmes. SDF’s reasoning was that it could do its work with fewer lumens, and that large giveaways and airdrops had shown diminishing effects. Total supply dropped from about 105 billion to about 50 billion overnight, and the XLM price jumped nearly 25% within an hour.

Technically, a Stellar burn is not a special function. SDF sent the lumens to an account with no usable signers, so nobody, SDF included, can ever move them. That account, GALAXYVOIDAOPZTDLHILAJQKCVVFMD4IKLXLSZV5YHO7VY74IWZILUTO, is public. You can check it on Horizon or in our XLM explorer: its only signer has a weight of zero, and its balance matches the dashboard’s burned total of about 55.44 billion XLM. That total is slightly higher than the 2019 transfer, because a small number of extra lumens have been sent there since.

There is no ongoing burn programme. Anyone claiming “XLM burns tokens every month” is confusing Stellar with other projects.

Pan-chan says

Want proof instead of promises? Paste the GALAXYVOID address into any Stellar explorer. Over 55 billion lumens, zero signing power, nobody to call.

XLM inflation and why there is no mining

With inflation gone, the XLM supply no longer grows. CAP-26 did not delete the inflation operation; it made any attempt to use it fail with an error. The proposal itself notes that this approach allows the mechanism to be turned back on in the future if needed, which is why careful sources say inflation is “disabled” and avoid calling the supply permanently fixed. Re-enabling it would take a protocol upgrade that validators vote to adopt.

There is no mining because Stellar does not use proof of work. Its Stellar Consensus Protocol is a form of federated Byzantine agreement: each validator chooses which other validators it trusts, and ledgers close by agreement about every 5 seconds. Nobody earns block rewards, and validators aren’t paid by the protocol at all. Grayscale’s trust filing describes the model as similar to proof of stake “but does not include staking rewards”. So any “XLM staking” product you see is a separate DeFi or exchange programme, not protocol-level staking. Our XLM staking and earning guide explains the options and their risks.

Transaction fees don’t create or redistribute lumens either. The minimum fee is 100 stroops (0.00001 XLM) per operation, and fees go into a locked fee pool that is “not given to or used by anyone”. At our latest check that pool held about 10.96 million XLM: a quiet, very slow sink that takes lumens out of circulation.

SDF lumen holdings: where every XLM sits today

Here is how the total supply broke down on SDF’s dashboard at our latest check. The four SDF accounts come from the foundation’s 2025 restructuring of its mandate.

According to SDF’s mandate page, each account has a job. SDF Development covers operating costs such as servers, marketing and policy work. Its lumens are sold on public exchanges such as Kraken, Coinbase and Bitstamp, and through direct sales. Stellar Growth funds developer programmes, grants, the Stellar Community Fund and user acquisition, and it can seed ETFs and ETPs. Product and Innovation pays for tools SDF builds or acquires to fill gaps in the ecosystem. Assets and Liquidity supports bringing stablecoins and tokenised assets onto Stellar, including market-making and on/off-ramp grants.

The mandate sets no fixed release schedule and no lock-up. SDF says it reallocates funds as ecosystem needs change and publishes quarterly reports on how it uses XLM. The earlier 2019 structure used four different buckets: Direct Development, Ecosystem Support, Use-Case Investment and User Acquisition. Older articles that quote those names describe the previous setup.

Why CoinGecko and the SDF dashboard show different XLM supply numbers

Most of the time, the two sources agree almost exactly on circulating supply. When numbers differ, between them or on other price sites, there are usually three reasons.

The first is timing. SDF’s dashboard updates on its own schedule, and aggregators may refresh supply data on a different cycle from price. If SDF has just moved lumens out of a mandate account, one source may show the change hours before the other.

The second is definitions. A tracker may treat the upgrade reserve or the fee pool differently, or put the total supply in its “max supply” field. Those choices can move the circulating figure by a few hundred million lumens, or produce a “max supply” that does not really exist.

The third is technical access. SDF’s dashboard API sends no cross-origin header, so browsers can’t fetch it directly from another site. That is why our live widget reads CoinGecko, and why we cross-check against the dashboard by hand. When precision matters, for example if you are calculating a fully diluted value, use the dashboard figures and note the time you checked.

Rich list and top holders: reading big XLM balances

Explorers such as StellarExpert show who holds an asset, and “rich lists” ranking accounts by XLM balance circulate widely. The top of any such list needs careful reading. The single biggest balance is the burn account above, which nobody can spend. Next come SDF’s mandate accounts, which are published openly. After that, many large balances may belong to exchanges or custodians holding coins for many customers in a single account, so one big address does not mean one big investor.

Two more things help. StellarExpert counted roughly 10.12 million funded accounts holding XLM at our latest check. And every account must keep a minimum balance of 1 XLM, plus 0.5 XLM for each trustline or offer, as explained in our guide to fees and reserves. Those reserves lock up a small amount of XLM across the network, but compared with 35 billion circulating lumens the effect is modest. Use our XLM explorer to look up any account yourself, and the Stellar glossary if terms like trustline or base reserve are new.

What XLM supply means for price

Supply doesn’t set the price, but it frames every price question. Market cap is price × circulating supply, so with about 35.25 billion lumens circulating, each $0.10 of price adds roughly $3.5 billion of market value. Our live XLM price page shows the current figures.

The bigger supply question is SDF. Its ~14.48 billion lumens are 29% of total supply, and some of them reach the market on an ongoing basis through exchange sales, grants and incentives. That is deliberate. It is how the foundation funds the network. It also means circulating supply drifts upward over time, which buyers have to absorb. On the other side, there is no mining, no staking issuance and no inflation adding new coins, and the 2019 burn removed more than half of the supply that once existed.

If you want to turn these numbers into scenarios, such as what $1 per XLM would mean on circulating versus fully diluted supply, our XLM price prediction guide does the maths and includes a calculator. For the basics of what XLM is used for, start with what is Stellar Lumens.

Ryu says

Circulating supply tells you today’s market cap. SDF’s holdings tell you tomorrow’s supply. Watch both before you size a position.

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