The fee pool keeps growing, so the supply is growing too.

The fee pool is a separate ledger-header field, defined by Stellar as the number of units paid in fees. While it grows from 0 at genesis to about 11.78 million π at the head, total_coins stays at exactly 100 billion. Fees move value out of balances into a pool; they do not create it.

FAQ — “The fee pool grows, so supply grows”

Objection. “You say the supply never changes — but fee_pool climbs by millions. That is new coins being created.”

Short answer

fee_pool and total_coins are two different fields in the same header, and Stellar defines them separately:

“Total coins — Total number of lumens in existence.”

“Fee pool — Number of lumens that have been paid in fees. Note this is denominated in lumens, even though a transaction’s fee field is in stroops.” — Ledger header fields, Stellar Docs (updated 2026-05-27) — docs/SOURCES.md §S3

A fee pool that grows while the total stays put is exactly what you would see if fees are moved out of balances and into the pool — a transfer, not a mint.

1. The measurement

Ledger	Closed	`fee_pool`	`total_coins`
2 (genesis)	2020-12-31T22:47:31Z	`0.0000000`	`100000000000.0000000`
6,588,955	2023-01-07T11:28:50Z	`72456.8500100`	`100000000000.0000000`
29,284,884 (head)	2026-10-18T21:08:55Z	`11781341.5131664`	`100000000000.0000000`

The fee pool went from zero to ~11.78 million π across the same ledgers on which the total did not move by a single stroop.

node examples/supply-check.mjs --samples 40

2. Why a growing fee pool is not issuance

Think about what a fee actually is. You pay it; it leaves your balance. Nothing is credited to anyone else in exchange for it — that is the point of a fee. The protocol records the accumulated fees in a dedicated field so that they are accounted for rather than silently disappearing.

So the two fields tell a consistent story:

total_coins — how much native value exists: constant.
fee_pool — how much of it has been paid in fees: growing.

If fees were issuance, you would expect the opposite: total_coins rising as fees accumulate. It does not. And if you want the structural reason fees cannot be issuance, it is the same one as everywhere else in this repository — the only native-issuance operation was removed at Protocol 12 (docs/SOURCES.md §S3), and the header’s inflationSeq reads 0.

3. An easy way to check the direction of travel

The fee pool only ever goes up in the samples, and there is no operation that pays fees back:

         2  2020-12-31T22:47:31Z  fee_pool = 0.0000000
   6588955  2023-01-07T11:28:50Z  fee_pool = 72456.8500100  (+)
  29284884  2026-10-18T21:08:55Z  fee_pool = 11781341.5131664  (+)

A field that can only rise and is defined as “already paid” is a sink, not a source.

4. What would change this conclusion

If total_coins ever moved in step with fee_pool — rising by roughly the same amount — the objection would be right. Falsifier F1 is precisely that test, and it has not fired.

← Every objection, in one table