Is Monero scarce?

Short answer: not in the Bitcoin sense. Monero has no fixed cap. Its main emission ended in May 2022 at about 18.13 million XMR, and since then it has paid miners a fixed tail emission of 0.6 XMR per block.

The arithmetic: blocks come about every two minutes, so 720 a day. 720 × 0.6 = 432 XMR a day, or about 157,680 XMR a year. Against a circulating supply of about 18.45 million (CoinLaw's May 2026 figure, citing CoinGecko), that is 157,680 ÷ 18,446,744 ≈ 0.86% a year. The rate shrinks each year, because the same number of coins is spread over a growing base. Bitcoin's cap is 21 million, and its new issuance is heading to zero.

So the fair reading is this. Monero's supply is smaller than Bitcoin's and its inflation is low, but it is not capped: it is 'a little more every block, forever.' Whether that counts as scarce enough is partly a question about the rule and partly about demand, and demand is something I won't forecast.

Sources differ slightly on the exact supply (about 18.44 to 18.45 million) because they were counted on different dates. A Monero block explorer will show the live figure.