Ten Web3 tokens expanded circulating supply by 99% to 180% in H1 2026. SN118 and SN110, both Bittensor subnets, lead the list. Berachain’s July hard fork restructured its entire block reward
Tokenomist data covering January through June 2026 shows a cluster of infrastructure assets printing supply at a pace the market has struggled to absorb. The platform recorded $97.43 billion in total token releases across major sectors in 2025, and the current year is tracking toward a similar scale, concentrated in fewer, faster-diluting names.
RankTokenSupply Growth (H1 2026)Main Emission Source1SN118 (Ditto)+180.6%Bittensor subnet allocations2HYPER+158.7%Hyperliquid ecosystem incentives3STBL+139.7%Linear DeFi yield vesting4SN110 (Rich Kids of TAO)+124.1%Bittensor subnet dilution5YB+117.7%Yield-bearing native issuance6GUN+113.9%Gaming infrastructure unlocks7WET+111.6%Ecosystem liquidity provisions8BR+107.1%Cross-chain bridging rewards9MBG+102.3%Governance incentive mining10BERA+99.7%Proof-of-Liquidity block emissionsThe two Bittensor entries are the most extreme case on the list. Subnet tokens such as SN118 and SN110 emit new supply continuously to pay for GPU clusters, model training, and decentralized storage. The technology may be genuine, but the funding model transfers the cost of that infrastructure directly onto token holders through dilution, and nothing on the demand side compensates them for it, since these subnets run no burns and pay no revenue back to the token.
Price equals market capitalization divided by circulating supply. If supply doubles and the market cap stays the same, the price halves. For the price to merely hold steady, the market cap has to double, which means new buyers must inject capital equal to the entire existing valuation within six months.
That kind of inflow shows up during full risk-on phases. It has not shown up in 2026, with US spot Bitcoin ETFs posting their worst redemption streak of the year and sentiment stuck in Extreme Fear. Tokenomist’s weekly research shows that tokens with heavy emissions over the past 30 days have broadly lagged the rest of the market, a pattern analysts now call the dilution overhang. The damage reaches well beyond small caps: SUI trades roughly 80% below its 2025 peak while still facing some of the largest dollar-value unlocks on the weekly calendar, and Starknet’s recent $6.75M release added 4.05% to circulating supply against a market cap near $300 million, down from a peak valuation of $8 billion.
Institutional desks have already repriced this risk. Firms such as Amina Group now treat supply inflation, treasury opacity, and governance structure as core underwriting inputs, on the same tier as liquidity and custody. A token with 80% of its total supply still locked gets valued differently than one with a clean float, regardless of what the chart shows today.
Berachain closed out the H1 leaderboard with a 99.7% supply expansion, and its case is instructive because much of the dilution was structural rather than scheduled. The network’s Proof-of-Liquidity design routes block rewards into DeFi vaults, and the PoL Next hard fork that went live on mainnet in early July rewrote the entire incentive layer, deprecating the non-transferable BGT governance token and switching to fixed WBERA block rewards. BERA has lost roughly 88% of its value over the past year, and total value locked on the network sits near $56 million.
ICON shows where that road ends. The network entered what its foundation calls economic shutdown in March 2026, ending all staking rewards and token emissions, and the chain will be permanently halted on December 31, 2026, with ICX holders migrating 1:1 into the SODA token on new infrastructure. From September 30, that migration becomes one-way. A nine-year-old Layer 1 concluded that its inflationary reward model had simply run out of road.
Reason: stock scene-setting sentence before the real argument begins. Infrastructure networks need validators, liquidity, and developers before they have paying users, and tokens are the only tool available to bootstrap that supply side. By this logic, emissions function like the customer acquisition budget of a Web2 startup, painful but temporary.
That defense holds only as long as the inflation actually ends on schedule, and some teams are proving it can. Hyperliquid’s June 6 cliff scheduled $675 million in HYPE for release, about 2.54% of circulating supply, yet the team committed to claiming only $38 million of it. Voluntary claim restraint has become its own market signal, one that separates projects managing dilution from those simply enduring it. Research from BMIC.ai reaches a similar conclusion from the yield side: platforms survive the transition only when real protocol fee revenue replaces raw inflationary emissions before holder patience runs out.
If the second half of 2026 repeats the first, capital rotation is the likely outcome rather than a broad recovery. Money exits high-emission infrastructure tokens and concentrates in assets with predictable or shrinking supply: Bitcoin, fee-burning Layer 1s, and stablecoin-adjacent yield structures on Ethereum. Analyst Crypto Patel captured the shift in investor behavior in a widely shared post, warning that before buying, “don’t just check the chart. Check the token emissions too.”
Aptos has produced the clearest template for the pivot so far. Its tokenomics proposal sets a hard supply cap of 2.1 billion APT, cuts staking rewards from 5.19% to 2.6%, burns 100% of base fees, ties future ecosystem emissions to measurable KPIs, and permanently locks and stakes 210 million tokens held by the foundation. The next test comes in the autumn unlock calendar. Hyperliquid’s core contributor cliff lands on August 6. Aptos investor vesting concludes this year, projected to cut new APT emissions by roughly 60% year over year after October.
The post Token Emissions 2026: 10 Coins That Doubled Their Supply appeared first on ETHNews.
