Where GST comes from, and where it burns

GST tokenomics are simple to describe and hard to live with. Green Satoshi Token is STEPN’s in-game utility token: you earn it by moving with Classic sneakers, and you spend it to level up, repair, mint and open boxes. The STEPN whitepaper says GST has infinite supply ^[source] . There is no hard cap, no fixed emission schedule and no halving. The amount of GST in the world rises and falls with what players do every day.

That single design choice explains most of what you see on the GST price chart. This page walks through the supply side in detail: how GST is created, the seven places it is destroyed, what the supply numbers actually tell you, and why “max supply” is the wrong question for this token. If you are new to the token itself, start with what Green Satoshi Token is and come back.

How is new GST created?

There is no team wallet that releases GST on a timetable. New GST is minted when players move. Every time you start a session with a Classic sneaker and stay inside its speed range, the app calculates a reward and credits fresh GST to your Spending account. The whitepaper lists the factors behind that reward: your speed against the sneaker’s optimal range, its Efficiency, bonuses from gems, sockets and badges, hidden system values, a random element, Durability, and the anti-cheat verdict ^[source] . FSL has never published an exact formula, so any calculator, including our GST earning calculator, is an estimate.

Two things limit how fast GST can be printed. The first is Energy. One Energy equals five minutes of earning activity, and the most you can hold is 20 per realm. You only get more Energy by owning more (or better) sneakers, which you can read about on the STEPN energy page. The second is the daily GST cap. Per the whitepaper, it starts at 5 GST and peaks at 300 GST as a sneaker is levelled. Above 300 you can raise the cap further by burning GMT.

So emission is not infinite at any given moment. It is bounded by how many active players there are, how much Energy they hold and how high their caps are. It is infinite only over time, because there is no total that the system stops at.

Why the caps matter for supply

Caps work like a speed limiter on a car. They do not reduce the distance you can drive in a year; they reduce how much you can do per day. When STEPN had huge user numbers, millions of daily sessions meant very large daily emission even with caps in place. Today, with a much smaller player base (FSL reported reaching a goal of 50,000 active users at its fifth anniversary ^[source] ), emission is lower in absolute terms. But the ratio between what is earned and what is burned still decides the direction of supply.

The seven GST burn sinks

The other half of the model is the sink. A sink is anything that takes GST out of circulation. The official tokenomics page lists seven:

Each of these sinks connects to a game page with the details. Leveling, repairs and gems sit on our level-up, repair and gems guide. Minting has its own mint cost tracker, because mint cost moves with the GST:GMT ratio.

How the daily burn works

GST you spend is not sent to a treasury. The whitepaper states that all GST users spent in the app is burned daily from the Spending account ^[source] . In practice that means a batch burn: spending accumulates during the day and is removed from supply in one go. The token is gone, not recycled into rewards.

There is a second, smaller flow you might hear about. The in-app swap on DOOAR charges a 1% fee, split 0.3% to liquidity providers, 0.6% to an ecosystem address and 0.1% to development. The whitepaper lists GMT buyback-and-burn and sneaker buyback-and-burn as possible uses of the ecosystem share ^[source] . That is a possible use, not a fixed GST burn, so do not count it as one.

What the GST supply numbers actually say

Because each realm has its own GST, there is no single supply number. The Solana token (sGST) is the one most data sites track. On CoinGecko, GST on Solana showed a total supply of about 1.157 billion and a circulating supply of about 1.147 billion when we compiled our facts ^[source] . The two numbers sit very close together, which is what you would expect from a token that is minted straight into players’ hands rather than locked in vesting contracts.

BNB Chain GST (bGST) has its own separate CoinGecko listing. Polygon GST (pGST) has no CoinGecko listing at all, so its supply has to be read from a block explorer. Never add these three together and call it “GST supply” as if they were one asset. They are three tokens that happen to share a name, and they trade at different prices on different chains.

Why “max supply” is not a meaningful number for GST

Data sites have a box called “Max Supply”. For GST it shows infinity or a dash. Some readers take that as a red flag and others ignore it. Both miss the point.

Max supply matters for tokens where scarcity is the value story, like Bitcoin or GMT. For a game currency it tells you almost nothing, because the question is not “how many can ever exist” but “how many are being created versus destroyed this month”. A game currency with no cap can hold its value if players keep spending it. A capped token can still collapse if nobody wants it. For GST, the useful numbers are:

• Daily emission: driven by active players, Energy and caps.
• Daily burn: driven by leveling, repairs, minting, gems, boxes and Enhancement.
• Net change: emission minus burn, which shows up as the change in total supply over time.

If total supply on a block explorer or CoinGecko rises steadily, more GST is being earned than burned. If it flattens or falls, sinks are winning. That trend tells you far more than a max-supply field ever could.

What an inflationary utility token means for price

Think about who holds GST and why. Most GST is earned by players who have no reason to keep it unless they plan to spend it in the game. If they are not leveling, minting or repairing, the rational move is to sell it. That selling is the main source of supply on exchanges.

On the other side, the buyers are mostly players who need GST for sinks: someone who wants to level a sneaker faster than their own earnings allow, or someone who wants to mint. Speculators exist, but the token has no staking yield, no governance rights and no fixed supply story to attract long-term holders.

So the price of GST is basically a balance between two groups of players: earners who sell and spenders who buy. When the game grows and new users need to level and mint, demand for GST is strong. When growth stops, burns slow, earners keep selling, and the price drifts down. This is the supply-side reason behind the long decline from the April 2022 peak of $8.51 on Solana to fractions of a cent today. The broader history, including the China GPS cut and the minting changes, is covered on our is STEPN still worth it page.

FSL has tried to shape this balance over time. Mint costs became dynamic, then tied to the GST:GMT ratio. Leveling milestones were made to need GMT. Mystery Box opening costs were added. Each change adds a sink or makes an existing sink scale with price. None of them can force demand if fewer people are playing.

How to read a supply chart

If you want to check the balance yourself, look at sGST total supply over a few months on CoinGecko or a Solana explorer. A steady climb means earning is beating burning. Compare it with the price chart. Rising supply plus falling price is the classic inflationary pattern. Flat supply plus a stable price suggests sinks are keeping up. Because pGST and bGST have smaller, separate economies, their trends can differ from Solana’s, which is one reason their prices drift apart.

GMT burns, for comparison

GMT, the governance token, works almost the opposite way. All 6,000,000,000 GMT were minted at launch on 9 March 2022, and no more can be created ^[source] . CoinGecko showed about 3.11 billion GMT in circulation when we checked ^[source] . GMT is earned by level-30 and Rainbow sneakers, but those rewards come from the existing allocation, not new minting.

GMT has its own sinks: milestone levels, minting, level-4+ gem upgrades, attribute redistribution, Enhancement, raising the GST cap and permanent success-rate boosts. When a player burns GMT to lift their GST cap above 300, they are trading a scarce token for the right to print more of an uncapped one. That is an interesting link between the two economies.

The Transparency Log in the whitepaper records GMT and sneaker events, and it is worth reading carefully. In June 2023, 3.085 billion GMT were burned on Solana and re-minted on Ethereum. That was a chain migration, not a reduction in supply. In March 2026, FSL bought back and burned 28 Genesis sneakers across BNB Chain, Polygon and Solana. These are real events, but they are not GST burns, and they do not change GST supply. Our GST vs GMT comparison covers the roles of the two tokens in more depth.

Common myths about GST supply

“FSL can mint GST whenever it wants.” The documented mechanism is emission through movement, limited by Energy and daily caps. The whitepaper does not describe a team allocation or treasury release for GST. We have no evidence of arbitrary minting, and we will not claim it.

“Burns make GST deflationary.” Only if burns are larger than emission over the same period. Burning is constant, but so is earning. The token is designed to be inflationary when players earn more than they spend.

“All three GST tokens share one supply.” They do not. The STEPN FAQ says GST is not shared across realms ^[source] . Each realm has its own token, its own emission and its own burns.

“A big burn announcement will fix the price.” Burn events for GMT or sneakers can help sentiment, but they do not touch GST supply. The only things that change GST supply are players moving and players spending.

What this means if you play or hold GST

If you earn GST, you are on the emission side. Whether you sell, spend or hold is your call, but understand that holding a token with no supply cap is a bet that the game’s demand will grow faster than its emission. If you spend GST, you are a sink: your leveling and repairs remove supply, and cheap GST lowers your costs in dollar terms.

Either way, the earning calculator helps you see how much GST you are likely to create per day, and the mint cost tracker shows how big the biggest sink currently is. Use those numbers rather than headlines when you decide what to do with your tokens. None of this is financial advice; it is a description of how the system is built.