A few days ago, I was talking with a friend about ASTER. When he saw the total supply of 8 billion, he frowned and said, "Isn't this just a blatant way to cut the leeks?" It reminded me of those early days—ETH has no cap, BNB only has 200 million, so why do projects now prefer to issue large supplies? I later realized that this is actually a choice driven by market and technological pressures.

Back then, the crypto space was still a blue ocean, and project teams focused on a refined approach. ETH controls supply through PoS, BNB creates scarcity by burning and halving, which seems logically clear. But now it's different; with ecosystem competition heating up, to grow the pie, a change in thinking is necessary. For projects like ASTER, they simply distribute more than half of the tokens to the community, and keep 20% for developer incentives—this is a typical co-creation ecosystem approach.

In fact, having a smaller issuance in a red ocean can be a trap. Small-cap coins are easily controlled and dumped by big players, whereas coins with higher circulation are more suitable for retail and institutional entry, providing a more stable valuation foundation. From a technical perspective, this also makes sense—new public chains need to support high-frequency small transactions. Tokens are both fuel and staking voting tools, and if the total supply is too small, circulation becomes impossible. XRP's issuance of 100 billion tokens follows this logic—to support cross-border small payments.

The key still lies in whether the project has a balancing strategy. ASTER's high community token share alone isn't enough; it also includes buyback and burn mechanisms to hedge against inflation, which is a mature design approach.

So, looking at coins now is actually very simple—don't get caught up in the numbers of issuance. There are only two real points to consider: first, whether the community holds a sufficiently high proportion of tokens; second, whether there is a genuine and feasible destruction mechanism. Projects that can find a balance between "everyone has a share" and "value remains stable" are the ones you can trust.