How to use
- Users — total number of participants in the economy. More participants means greater potential token flow.
- Asset price (tokens) and Buy probability (%) — define a sink: how many tokens buyers spend on digital assets.
- Rewards/Emission per buyer (tokens/day) and Expense per buyer (tokens/day) — set the daily token inflow (source) and outflow (sink) per buyer. Rewards create a source of tokens (emission into wallets), expense creates a sink (spending inside the system).
- Lifetime (days) — the calculation horizon in days. The longer a participant stays, the more tokens they generate or absorb.
- Token sources and sinks are calculated across buyers (Sources = buyers × rewards × days; Sinks = buyers × expense × days + asset purchases). Asset purchases are weighted by probability: not all participants buy.
- The result shows the sinks-to-sources ratio. If sinks ≥ sources — emission is absorbed by in-system activity. If sinks < sources — net surplus of tokens accumulates; whether that translates into exchange sell pressure depends on velocity and liquidity, which this model does not capture.
This calculator measures emission-vs-absorption balance inside the system, not market price. It has no velocity or liquidity component — the equation of exchange (MV = PQ) is not modeled. The ratio is a signal of flow imbalance, not a direct price signal. For velocity-aware analysis see the Token Velocity Calculator, and for broader emission design see Token Supply Models.
Cohort assumption: rewards/emission in this model accrue only to the buyer cohort (Users × Buy probability). Real emission schemes often reward all active participants regardless of whether they also buy assets. Treat the “buyers-only emission” wiring as a simplification; if your design emits to all users, multiply Sources by Users / Buyers to approximate.
Calculator
round(Users × Buy probability %). At the low corner (Users = 10, Buy probability = 5%) the expected value is 0.5 buyers — which JavaScript’s Math.round rounds up to 1, while some other environments (e.g. Python’s banker’s rounding) would return 0. If you reproduce this calculator elsewhere and see “No buyers” instead of 1 buyer for that input combination, that rounding convention is the reason.As Lifetime grows, the one-off Buyers × Price term shrinks relative to the recurring Buyers × Expense × Lifetime term, and the ratio asymptotes to Expense / Rewards. That shrinkage is real but slow: with Price, Expense and Rewards left at their defaults (400 / 2 / 5), the ratio at the slider’s maximum Lifetime (365 days) is still 0.619 against an asymptote of 0.400—54.8% above it. Price’s relative weight shrinks as Lifetime grows, but it doesn’t vanish within the slider’s own range.
Users and Buy probability, however, do not move the Ratio or the verdict at any Lifetime—Buyers cancels out of Ratio = Sinks / Sources algebraically. What they do move is the Buyers count and the absolute Sources/Sinks figures printed next to the bars (the bar lengths themselves are normalized and don’t shift). That leverage on the printed figures grows with Lifetime rather than shrinking—the opposite of what a “use short lifetimes for Users to matter” rule of thumb would suggest: moving Users from 10 to 500 shifts the Sources figure by about 14,700 tokens at Lifetime = 30, versus about 178,850 tokens at Lifetime = 365.
Formulas
- Buyers — number of buyers (computed)
- Users — total number of participants in the economy
- Buy_probability_% — probability of buying an asset (percentage, 0 to 100)
- Sources — total token inflow into buyer wallets from emission (computed)
- Buyers — number of buyers
- Rewards — daily token rewards/emission per buyer
- Lifetime — participant lifetime in days
- Assumption: rewards accrue only to the buyer cohort. If all users receive emission, scale by
Users / Buyers.
- Sinks — total token outflow from buyer wallets back into the system (computed)
- Price — asset price in tokens (one-time expense)
- Expense — daily token expense per buyer
- Ratio — sinks-to-sources ratio (computed, dimensionless)
- If Ratio ≥ 1 — in-system sinks absorb emission; net token accumulation is non-positive.
- If Ratio < 1 — net token surplus accumulates in wallets. Price impact on secondary markets is not determined by this ratio alone — it depends on velocity, sell-through rate, and liquidity depth (see the Token Velocity Calculator).
Related
- Token Velocity Calculator — adds a velocity/liquidity lens (MV = PQ) to complement the source/sink view used here.
- Token Supply Models — how different distribution models (allocation, bonding curve, airdrop, reward, market) shape the source side of this equation.