KEEP "circulating" supply

This is a very quick article to clarify something about the KEEP circulating supply as displayed on Coingecko as there has been a few questions and Twitter threads popping around about it.

First of all, one should recognize that "circulating supply" is not a universally defined metric. Should staked tokens be counted as circulating? Should the company's multisigs be counted as circulating? Ask different people and you'll get different answers. There are however two metrics that can be objectively measured: liquid supply and free-float.

Liquid supply: All of the unlocked tokens that can be transferred freely (and thus sold) at any time both legally and technically (smart contract vesting).

Free float: All of the tokens that are readily available to buy on exchanges.

Let's look into what this gives us in the case of KEEP.

According to the Messari transparency report which was shared by the Keep team on both Discord and Twitter, the liquid supply is currently sitting above 250M. Indeed, the company owns 250M tokens which they can legally and technically transfer at any time. Digging around, it can be found that there is also roughly 50M tokens in the random beacon staking contracts.

As for the free-float, a brief look at the blockchain seems to indicate that there are 1M KEEP tokens readily available to buy on exchanges, both CEX and DEX.

So how does Coingecko arrive at a 10M "circulating supply"? The answer is that the definition of circulating supply is arbitrary. For example, Coingecko doesn't count the company or team's multisig wallets as part of the circulating supply, even if there is no vesting (legal or technical). The 1/3rd of the total supply of LINK tokens owned by the Chainlink team do not show as circulating for example. As such, this excludes the 250M KEEP owned by the Keep company.

For tokens staked, Coingecko uses a case by case approach. The tokens staked on the Keep random beacon contracts are currently locked by a binding legal agreement for the most part, but will eventually be unlockable after a 2 weeks undelegating period. They are technically not liquid, but still somewhat liquid and definitely not part of the free-float. So should they be counted as circulating? Your guess is as good as mine.

The bottom line is that the problem of circulating supply is nothing new in crypto. Many other projects on Coingecko have the company's wallets excluded from the circulating supply: ChainLink's holdings of 30% of the supply, and Ren's holdings of 10% of the supply. In the case of Keep, not counting the 250M is simply a consistent way to define part of the "circulating supply" on Coingecko.