What Is MESSIER (M87) and Why 11.5 Percent of Its Supply Sits at the Burn Address

MESSIER (M87) is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum that borrows its name from a galaxy, the one astronomers photographed a black hole inside in 2019. On 22 September 2026 the burn address held 115,183,706,056.1 M87, or 11.5184 percent of a total supply that has never moved off one trillion.

The project's own tokenomics page publishes a circulating supply of 884,846,293,944 M87. Subtract the burn address balance from total supply at Ethereum block 26,034,209 and the answer is 884,816,293,943.9. Those two figures differ by 30,000,000.1 tokens out of 884.8 billion, and that gap shows you exactly where the published number comes from.

MESSIER (M87) at a Glance

What Is MESSIER (M87) and Where the Name Comes From

Messier 87 is a galaxy in the Virgo cluster, and in April 2019 the Event Horizon Telescope published the first direct image of a black hole at its centre. The token took the catalogue number and ran with it. MESSIER sits in the crypto corner where a borrowed name does the marketing, and a search for the ticker fills with galaxy comparisons before it reaches the chain. The MESSIER token itself is plain ERC-20 on Ethereum with eighteen decimals, deployed at a contract the project publishes in its own documentation. Read the name and symbol straight off that contract and you'll get Messier and M87.

Method: every chain figure below comes from a direct read of contract 0x80122c6a83C8202Ea365233363d3f4837D13e888 on Ethereum mainnet at block 26,034,209, calling totalSupply and balanceOf against a public node. Nothing came from an aggregator.

The Two Supply Numbers That Do Not Match

The M87 tokenomics page lists a total supply of one trillion and a circulating supply of 884,846,293,944. It gives no method for the second figure, so the only way to test it is to rebuild it.

Total supply on chain reads 1,000,000,000,000 M87 and the burn address holds 115,183,706,056.1 of that. Subtract the second from the first and you get 884,816,293,943.9, or 30,000,000.1 tokens below the published figure. On a base of 884.8 billion that is a gap of 0.0034 percent, and the digits either side of it line up far too well for coincidence.

So the project's circulating supply is total supply minus the burn address, and somebody worked it out once. The tokenomics page carries a machine-readable timestamp of 25 August 2024 in its own markup, and 758 days separate that stamp from the read above. Across those 758 days the burn address took in 30,000,000.1 M87, which is 0.026 percent of what it already held.

The utility page describes a buy-and-burn mechanism and says supply "is continuously reduced". Thirty million tokens in 758 days is a trickle against a 115 billion pile, and the mechanism it describes does not reduce supply at all. It moves tokens to an address no one holds the key to. That distinction matters for anyone reading a guide to token burning and expecting the supply line to fall afterwards.

What the M87 Burn Address Does to the Supply

An ERC-20 balance is a row in a mapping, and a burn address is a row whose private key does not exist. The M87 burn address is the standard dead address, and 115,183,706,056.1 M87 have landed in it. The zero address, the other place people send tokens to destroy them, holds exactly nothing at this contract.

The practical effect is real enough. Those tokens will not trade, will not vote and will not earn staking rewards, so float and voting power both shrink by 11.5184 percent.

The accounting effect runs the other way. Total supply still reads one trillion, so every percentage the project quotes against total supply still divides by the full trillion. Any tokenomics model that treats a dead-address balance as destroyed supply will overstate scarcity by exactly that much.

The Numbers on the Messier Site Come From a Catch Block

The project's front page shows three figures, one under a burn icon, one under a rewards badge and one under a treasury heading. None of them comes from the chain.

The page asks a private endpoint at virgo-api.messier.app for its state, and that endpoint answers 401 Unauthorized to everyone. It answers 401 to the front end as well, even though the bundle ships the authorisation header the call expects. So the catch block runs, and the catch block carries hardcoded strings. Total Burned reads 120,137,552,207 M87. Total Distributed shows $64,169.71 and Treasury Value shows $142,206.09.

That hardcoded burn figure sits 4,953,846,150.9 M87 above what the dead address holds. The live field it stands in for counts burns routed through the project's NFTs, so the two were never the same measurement, and the fallback is the only one a visitor ever sees. Anyone quoting a MESSIER burn total from the site is quoting a string in a JavaScript bundle.

How M87 Tokenomics and the Virgo Treasury Drive the Burn

The M87 tokenomics live inside a DAO structure the documentation calls Virgo. Its treasury collects service fees from the project's applications and can hold any ERC-20 token without limit, with one exception written into the design. ETH is capped at 87, and anything above that cap triggers the buy-and-burn contract.

Governance splits in two. The top 87 stakers hold the exclusive right to create proposals, and the docs call that group Powehi. Every other staker votes on what Powehi puts up, from a group called Halo. When a proposal passes, the contract buys the listed token on the market and holds 87 percent of it in the treasury until the cycle ends. Another 12.13 percent goes to every wallet in the regular pool, on the crypto staking terms the documentation sets out.

Method: I opened fourteen pages of the project's documentation looking for a Virgo treasury address, the treasury page and the audit page among them. Not one of them publishes an address. The only Ethereum address anywhere in those fourteen pages is the token contract, so the 87-ETH cap and the buy-and-burn trigger cannot be checked on chain from the project's own material. Five firms appear on the audit page, and the safety page names HashEx and Aegis AI on the token contract itself.

Where M87 Trades, and Why It Has No Phemex Market

The flagship venue is a Uniswap V2 pair against WETH. At block 26,034,209 it held about 29.8 billion M87 and about 270 WETH, or 2.98 percent of the token's supply on one side of one pool. Pool balances move with every trade, so read that as a snapshot and not a standing number. A read ninety-four blocks earlier showed 29.82 billion M87 and 269.64 WETH, and the difference between the two is one trade, not a disagreement between two sources.

Phemex lists no M87 market of any kind. The product file behind the exchange carries 891 perpetual contracts, 1,177 spot products and 1,141 currencies on 22 September 2026, and M87 appears in none of them. There is no delisting in that history either, because the pair was never there to remove. Anyone searching for an M87 perpetual is searching for a contract that has never existed on this venue.

Two Phemex URLs will still render for the name, the how-to-buy page and the price page, and both are templates that generate for any string. Neither one is a market.

What Should a Trader Watch on the M87 Token

Depth is the first number. One Uniswap pool holding 2.98 percent of supply against 270 WETH is the whole of the flagship market, and a position that wants out in size has one door to go through.

The trading tax is the second. The tokenomics page sets a 3 percent fee on buys and sells and zero on wallet-to-wallet transfers, so a round trip costs 6 percent before slippage and before gas.

Staleness is the third, and it is the one that feeds everything else. A tokenomics page last edited on 25 August 2024 and a burn total hardcoded into a bundle are the two public figures most trackers copy, and both overstated the position on 22 September 2026. If you check the contract yourself, you'll have a different answer inside a minute.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is MESSIER (M87) the same thing as the galaxy called Messier 87?

No. Charles Messier catalogued the galaxy in 1781, and the M87 token is an ERC-20 contract deployed on Ethereum more than two centuries later. The ticker is the only thing they share.

Is the M87 liquidity locked, and who audited the contract?

The project's safety page says the liquidity has been locked for ten years and that the development team completed a KYC process with SolidProof. That same page still carries a copyright line dated 2023.

How much of the M87 token supply can a single wallet hold?

The tokenomics page sets a maximum wallet capacity of 2 percent of total supply, which works out at 20,000,000,000 M87. It also states the token launched with no presale and no private sale.

What do you get back when you stake M87 in the Virgo DAO?

Staking returns an equal amount of MTT, the Messier Traveler Token, and the docs say holders can withdraw earnings at any time with no lock-up period. NFT holders from the early auctions start out auto-staked.

Bottom Line

Read the chain and the most quotable statistic about MESSIER (M87) turns out to have barely moved since a page the project stopped editing on 25 August 2024. The 30,000,000.1-token gap between their circulating figure and the arithmetic that produces it is the tell. It says the number is a subtraction somebody ran once and walked away from, and it says the same about the burn total on the front page and about a treasury cap that no published address makes testable. A project that publishes its contract hands you everything you need to check its claims, and this one does. Checking it is what nobody seems to have bothered doing.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.