Many networks issue new tokens on a published schedule. The schedule determines how much supply arrives, and who receives it determines how much of that arrival reaches the market.
Emissions are contractual, not discretionary
Issuance schedules are written into protocol rules or contracts, specifying amounts per period and how they decline over time.
Because they are encoded, the schedule proceeds regardless of market conditions, and changing it requires a protocol change rather than a decision.
This makes future supply calculable, which is why emission schedules are published and compared as a standard part of evaluating a network.
Recipients differ in what they must do
Issuance to miners or validators funds an operation with real costs in electricity, hardware and staff, most of which must be paid in conventional currency.
Recipients with ongoing expenses convert a substantial portion as a matter of necessity, so their receipts translate fairly directly into selling.
Issuance to a treasury or to long-locked participants creates no such obligation, and the tokens may remain unmoved for extended periods.
Vesting shifts timing rather than quantity
Allocations to founders, employees and early backers typically vest over years, often after an initial period during which nothing is released.
The total is unchanged by vesting. What changes is when it becomes transferable, which concentrates potential supply at cliff dates.
Because these schedules are usually disclosed, upcoming unlock dates are widely tracked, and anticipation can affect markets before any tokens actually move.
Burning offsets rather than reverses
Some designs destroy tokens as part of transaction processing, reducing supply in proportion to network usage.
Net supply change is issuance minus destruction, so a network with heavy usage can issue continuously while its total supply declines.
The relationship is conditional on usage, so a design that reduces supply under heavy demand behaves differently when demand falls away.
Reading a schedule against circulating supply
The meaningful comparison is new issuance against the supply already circulating, since the same absolute amount matters more against a small float.
Projects with a low initial circulating supply and large future unlocks face proportionally large increases even when the schedule looks modest in absolute terms.
None of this determines price, which depends on demand as well as supply, but the supply side is the part that is published in advance and therefore knowable.
Fully diluted figures attempt to capture this by valuing total eventual supply at the current price. That comparison assumes future tokens are equivalent to present ones, which the vesting structure often contradicts.