ATOM has a very specific total supply — 260,906,513 to be exact. Of these, at the time of writing, about 203,121,910 were in circulation. It is worth noting that these cryptocurrencies aren’t mined — instead, they are earned through [staking](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/staking).
Two private sales were held in January 2017, followed by a public sale in April of that year. This raised a total of $16 million, which is the equivalent of about $0.10 per ATOM.
Breaking down the token distribution, about 80% was allocated to investors, while the remaining 20% was split between two companies: All In Bits and the Interchain Foundation.
Cosmos has compared ATOM tokens to the ASICs that are used to mine Bitcoin. As a technical paper written by the Tendermint team explained: “It is a piece of virtualized hardware (economic capital) that you need to obtain in order to participate as a keeper in the network.”