White the total supply of Monero is estimated to be mined by 2022, over 90% of the cryptocurrency is already mined. The information comes from Moneroblocks, which states that as of December 20th, 16.6 million of the privacy-focused coins are already mined, and the rest 1.8 million will be mined in 3 years.
The major difference with Bitcoin, however, is the fact that the supply of Monero is actually not fixed. While all the Monero coins will be mined by May 31st 2022, miners will be compensated through a different type of emission called Tail Emission.
To keep the project going, with all the security and rewards involved, miners will receive a reward in the form of 0.6 Monero coins per block. The current block reward is 3.41. The mining reward of 0.6 will be continuous. This is supposed to provide additional incentives for the Monero mining community, especially when transaction fees may decrease drastically in the near future.
Th tokens that are rewarded per block of mining are expected to go down with time, until they reach the quantity of 0.6 after May 31st, 2022. While the end for Bitcoin seems far away, the mechanisms which regulate the token supplies are constantly being challenged by the mining community and cryptocurrency “developers”. Off-chain and other alternative solutions may discourage the mining community of major alt coins.