Total supply
In short Total supply is how many tokens currently exist, including locked and team-held ones but not burned ones. It is not circulating or max supply.
Total supply is the number of tokens that exist at a given moment: everything created minus anything destroyed by a real burn. It includes team holdings, treasury tokens, tokens locked in vesting contracts, and tokens held by regular buyers. It is not max supply, the hard cap on how many can ever exist, and it is not circulating supply, which counts only tokens actually free to trade.
On-chain, it is just a number the token contract tracks. ERC-20 and BEP-20 contracts expose a totalSupply function, and SPL tokens on Solana store a supply value in the mint account. It rises when tokens are minted and falls when a contract-level burn destroys them. Many tokens create everything at launch, while others keep a mint function or mint authority that can create more later.
Price means little without supply. Price times circulating supply gives market cap, while fully diluted valuation normally uses max supply when one is defined, so price times total supply can differ a lot from it if more minting is possible. A big gap between total and circulating supply may be scheduled unlocks, a treasury, or other excluded allocations, so find out which. A trillion-token supply is mostly cosmetic, and a tiny price per token does not make a project cheap.
Check supply on a block explorer rather than trusting a listing site, which can lag. Then check who can actually change it: whether a mint function exists, who holds the minting role or authority, whether a cap is enforced in code, and whether the contract is upgradeable. On EVM chains, renounced ownership does not settle this, since separate minting roles or upgrade powers can remain, and retained ownership does not automatically allow minting. Also look at the deployer and top holder wallets and read any vesting schedule.
Watch how burns are done. Sending tokens to a dead address generally does not reduce totalSupply, since the contract still counts them even though they are out of reach, while a contract-level burn normally does. Reported supply can therefore overstate what is realistically available.