How many characters can UTF-8 encode?

Question

If UTF-8 is 8 bits, does it not mean that there can be only maximum of 256 different characters?

The first 128 code points are the same as in ASCII. But it says UTF-

Answer 1

UTF-8 is a variable length encoding with a minimum of 8 bits per character.
Characters with higher code points will take up to 32 bits.