What is Inflation?
The rate at which prices rise, and the reason 'hard-capped supply' is a selling point.
Inflation erodes the purchasing power of cash. Assets with fixed or slow-growing supply are pitched as a hedge, though crypto's correlation with risk assets has often dominated that story.
For a single coin, 'inflation' also means its own issuance rate: how fast new tokens dilute holders.
Related terms
- Interest rateMacro
The central-bank policy rate; higher rates tend to pull money out of risk assets.
- Max supplyBasics
The hard ceiling on how many coins a protocol will ever create, where one exists.
- HalvingBasics
The scheduled cut in new Bitcoin issued per block, every 210,000 blocks, roughly four years.