Crypto glossary
Emission schedule
An emission schedule is the predefined timetable that sets how many new tokens are released, when, and to whom, such as miners, stakers or liquidity providers.
An emission schedule describes the path of new issuance after launch. It can be a step function, like Bitcoin's block reward halving every 210,000 blocks, a smooth decay curve, a fixed number of tokens per block, or a set of liquidity-mining epochs whose rewards shrink week by week. It is usually published in the whitepaper or tokenomics docs and enforced by contracts.
Investors read it to forecast how quickly supply will grow and how much sell pressure recipients may add. Halvings, emission cuts and the end of incentive programs are tracked as market events, and comparing scheduled emissions with protocol revenue shows whether usage could ever pay for security without subsidies.
An emission schedule is different from a vesting or unlock schedule, which governs tokens that already exist but are locked for the team and investors. Schedules controlled by governance can also be changed by vote, so a published curve is a plan rather than a promise unless it is hard-coded.
Example
A DEX distributes 1 million governance tokens in its first month of liquidity mining and cuts the amount by 10% every month after, so emissions fall below 350,000 tokens a month within a year.