90% of Monero [XMR] until the beginning of its Tail Emission has been extracted

More than 90% of Monero – a privacy-focused cryptocurrency – coins have been mined into circulation. According to MoneroBlocks.info, a Monero blockchain explorer 16,656,640 coins of the possible 18.4 million coins have been mined.

This represents roughly 90.5% of the total amount that will be in circulation. It is scheduled that the last coin will be mined on May 31st, 2022. At this point, a new supply schedule will be released which will see XMR miners get rewarded about 0.6 XMR per block. According to the Monero whitepaper, this schedule is referred to as the Tail Emission.

Similar to Bitcoin’s supply schedule, Monero’s reward system involves a sequence of reducing the coins that are released into circulation through mining. This is referred to as the block reward system and currently, miners are rewarded 3.41 XMR for every block they mine.

This reward keeps on reducing until the onset of the Tail Emission in 2022. It is approximated that the block reward in May 2022 would have reached 0.6 XMR and is expected to continue at a constant pace once the 18.4 million coins are mined. Tail Emission, therefore, ensures that miners will always be rewarded for contributing resources to securing the network and confirming transactions.

One effect of a reducing coin supply is that that deflation leads to increased value and looking at XMR’s supply schedule, there will be fewer and fewer coins coming into circulation thereby propping up the XMR price.

This means that the long-term prospects of Monero are especially bullish. According to figures from CoinMetrics, the inflation rate for Monero is falling faster than Bitcoin’s and is set to catch up to Bitcoin’s rate approximately in August 10th, 2019 after which it will continue falling further.