The simple thing is that the total supply of $NIGHT is 24 billion tokens and these tokens can exist on both cardano and @MidnightNetwork .
Each token can be in three states: either reserved, temporarily locked or unlocked and freely accessible.
Because this can happen on both chains, each state is counted differently on both networks.
The purpose of this system is that the movement of tokens is properly tracked and the total supply never exceeds 24 billion.