Supply, schedule, and structure.
Equium has a fixed 21,000,000 token supply, split 10/90 between a premine and the mineable pool. The mineable portion is released via a Bitcoin-style halving curve. The cap is enforced at the SPL Token level by revoking mint authority before launch.
Mint address
The official EQM token mint on Solana mainnet is below. Verify this before buying on any DEX — anyone can create a token called "EQM" and a mismatched address is the most reliable way to spot a fake.
Supply breakdown
| Allocation | Amount | Share | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mineable pool | 18,900,000 EQM | 90% | Distributed via proof-of-work, 25 EQM per block, halving every 378k blocks. |
| Premine | 2,100,000 EQM | 10% | Reserved for DEX liquidity provisioning and operational expenses. No founder allocation, no team vesting. |
Halving curve
Every 378,000 blocks the per-block reward halves. At the protocol's one-minute target block time, that's roughly one halving every 8.6 months. The first ten eras account for over 99% of the total mineable supply.
| Era | Reward | Era supply | Cumulative |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 25.00 EQM | 9,450,000 | 9,450,000 |
| 2 | 12.50 EQM | 4,725,000 | 14,175,000 |
| 3 | 6.25 EQM | 2,362,500 | 16,537,500 |
| 4 | 3.125 EQM | 1,181,250 | 17,718,750 |
| 5 | 1.5625 EQM | 590,625 | 18,309,375 |
| 6 | 0.78 EQM | 295,313 | 18,604,688 |
| … | … | … | → 18,900,000 |
Because the schedule is geometric, the protocol never quite reaches the cap; in practice it gets arbitrarily close, and the final dust rounds to zero once the per-block reward drops below one base unit.
How the cap is enforced
Three independent properties combine to make the supply ceiling structural rather than a promise:
- Pre-minted supply. The entire 21,000,000 supply is minted off-chain by the deployer before the public launch and deposited into the program-controlled mineable vault. The program itself never mints new tokens.
- Vault-bound transfers. The on-chain program can only move tokens out of its vault, not produce new ones. Once the vault is drained, no further EQM exists.
- Revoked mint authority. Before launch, mint authority on the SPL Token is set to
None. This is enforced by the Solana runtime — no Solana account, including Equium's own program, can mint additional tokens after that point.
Empty rounds reduce float
If a round closes without a winning solution (rare, but possible during low-hashrate periods), its 25-EQM reward stays in the vault permanently. The vault balance never recovers; the rest of the schedule continues from where it left off. So real circulating supply tracks slightly below the theoretical maximum.
Vault mechanics
The mineable vault is a program-derived token account at find_program_address(["equium-vault"]). The program owns it; no external signature can move tokens from it outside of the protocol's mine instruction.
At launch, the deployer calls fund_vault exactly once to transfer the 18,900,000 mineable supply into this account. The instruction includes a one-shot guard: it cannot be called a second time, and the value transferred is checked against the configured mineable amount. After fund_vault, the program flips a flag on the config and mining opens.
Market mechanics
Equium is not designed to be a yield product. The economic model is deliberately simple:
- Supply schedule is fixed. 25 EQM enters the mineable supply each block (in expectation), halving over time. Nothing on the protocol side dynamically responds to market conditions.
- Demand drives price. Whatever EQM is worth in SOL terms is decided on open markets. The protocol takes no fee, runs no treasury, and burns nothing.
- Mining cost floor. Each block costs roughly the SOL fee of a Solana transaction plus the electricity of solving Equihash. That floor is well below current Solana fee market levels and is essentially negligible in dollar terms.
Comparison with Bitcoin
The emission curve is deliberately a scaled Bitcoin: same halving cadence in halvings-per-supply terms, faster in wall-clock terms because Solana blocks are roughly an order of magnitude faster. The 21,000,000 number is also a direct copy. The differences:
- PoW is Equihash 96,5 (memory-hard, CPU-friendly), not SHA-256 (compute-hard, ASIC-dominated). The goal is to keep mining accessible to commodity hardware.
- Settlement is on Solana, so transaction fees are sub-cent rather than dollar-range.
- There is a 10% premine for liquidity, where Bitcoin had none. The founders did not allocate themselves any tokens; the premine is for DEX pools.