Looking at epoch 316 details on CardanoScan (https://cardanoscan.io/epoch/316) and I see that the Total Output value has 53 billion ADA.
What does this field mean? How can it be greater than the total supply of ADA which is 45 billion?
1 Answer
Imagine you have $100, and it exchanges hands 10 times in 1 day. That means in a single day there was $1000 worth of value transfer, even though it was the same $100 moving the whole time. Total Epoch output is the same way. If 1M ADA is transferred 45,000 times in one epoch, thats already 45B ADA total output.
Additionally, change likely makes up the majority of the total output metric. In a UTXO system like Cardano, if I have a single UTXO with 1M ADA in it and I only want to send you 100 ADA, the whole UTXO will be used as an input and two outputs will be created - one to your address for 100 ADA and one back to me as change for 999900 ADA. So even though I only sent you 100ADA, the total output for that Tx would be 1M ADA.
-
Very interesting. So the value is a 'summation' of all the UTXO amounts that moved around during that epoch. I guess my thinking was around an account-based ledger.– SkelliFeb 1, 2022 at 17:43