Supply expansion
How $BIT supply grows — per-block mints driven by the bits field of every Bitcoin block.
No fixed cap
$BIT does not have a fixed maximum supply. The total supply at any moment equals the sum of $BIT minted from all claimed blocks so far. New blocks can always be minted as Bitcoin produces them, until the protocol's allowed range is exhausted, if any.
Per-block emission
Each Bitcoin block contributes a quantity of $BIT equal to the integer value of its bits field. Bitcoin blocks land roughly every 10 minutes, so $BIT supply expansion tracks Bitcoin's block production — no team-controlled emission schedule, no inflation curve set in advance.
The supply curve declines over time
Bitcoin's bits field encodes the difficulty target. As the network's hashrate grows, difficulty rises, and the bits integer falls. So per-block $BIT mints get smaller over time. The math is a function of Bitcoin itself, not a token-team decision.
Concretely: early Bitcoin blocks had higher bits values; modern blocks (post-2024) have much lower ones. The earliest blocks mint the most $BIT. Late blocks mint less.
| Block | Approx. bits integer | Approx. $BIT mint |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ~486,604,799 | ~487M |
| 100,000 | ~452,491,029 | ~452M |
| 500,000 | ~402,841,392 | ~403M |
| 800,000 | ~386,220,668 | ~386M |
| 840,000 | ~385,948,428 | ~386M |
Approximate values for illustration. Final mint function (full integer vs other transformation) is being finalized — see the bitpaper at launch.
What this means for holders
- Older blocks are scarcer to claim — once minted, they're gone forever, and they emit the largest $BIT amounts.
- No emission schedule from the team — emission is whatever Bitcoin blocks have produced.
- Variable per-block reward — $BIT minted per block is not constant, unlike most fixed-reward tokens.
Compared to Bitcoin's own supply
Bitcoin caps at 21M coins via halvings. $BIT does not — it follows the bits field, which has no hard cap. They share the cadence (per-block) but not the math: Bitcoin halves on a schedule; $BIT decays continuously with difficulty.
$BIT uses the whole-integer reading of the bits field. Each block's bits is decoded directly to its base-10 integer value, and that integer is the $BIT amount minted by the first valid inscription for that block.