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WARNING: Maximum Total Supply, Minting and Burning of Tokens

The variable maxTotalSupply is set when the contract is created and limits the total number of tokens that can be minted. It represents authorized shares and can be updated per company legal documents by setMaxTotalSupply.

Reserve Admins can mint tokens to and burn tokens from any address. This is primarily to comply with law enforcement, regulations and stock issuance scenarios - but this centralized power could be abused. Transfer Admins, authorized by Contract Admins, can also update the transfer rules at any moment in time as many times as they want.

Token Supply​

There are also values that can be read from the smart contract for total token supply, circulating token supply, and unissued token supply. These correspond to the analogous Authorized shares, Outstanding shares, and Unissued shares, respectively, that exist in the context of stocks.

These methods are totalTokenSupply(), circulatingTokenSupply(), and unissuedTokenSupply().

Issue shares to investors​

The reserve admin distributes the unissuedTokenSupply() to investors using either mint() or mintReleaseSchedule(), which increases the circulatingTokenSupply(). This method of token issuance should be used by issuers.

From a company shares perspective there are "authorized" and "outstanding" (issued) shares. For security tokens the authorized and unissued shares should not be held in a blockchain account. If they are unissued they should be distributed using the mint() or mintReleaseSchedule() functions. If shares are repurchased or reclaimed they should be retired by burning them. This is because all shares distributed to blockchain addresses receive dividend distributions.

Issued is a synonym for outstanding.

It should always hold true that circulatingTokenSupply == outstanding == issued, as these terms represent the same concept. Both circulatingTokenSupply() and totalSupply() reflect this value on-chain, ensuring consistency across these metrics.

Any "treasury" should not be issued on chain in a blockchain address. authorized == maxTokenSupply (also synonyms).