Understanding Filecoin economic model.. Detailed analysis report

What problem does Filecoin want to solve

 As a brand new data storage and distribution network, the Filecoin network expects to be a roughly distributed, efficient and powerful infrastructure for human information, storing valuable information in the wave of Web3.0.

As the wave of informatization continues, the gap in the demand for value information storage created by humans will become larger and larger. The above figure predicts the scale growth effect of the global storage data growth. At present, the top five centralized storage service providers in the world control 77% of the storage market. Any challenger who wants to enter the storage track needs to compete with top competitors for market visibility, equipment stability, and potential user stickiness. There is no doubt that this challenge is no different from hitting a rock with a pebble.

The Filecoin network currently has sufficient visibility and corresponding infrastructure on the storage track , and has the potential to challenge the traditional centralized storage service provider giants. It has launched an open participation model. Any competitor who wants to store effective information for humans can devote themselves to the Filecoin network as a storage node, as long as they have enough hardware equipment and can connect to the Internet.

In order to enable storage nodes participating in the Filecoin network to store value information more effectively, Filecoin officially designed a corresponding economic model to incentivize all network contributors. As an "island for exporting storage-related products and services", the design allows the individual behavior of all participants to be compatible with network goal incentives, so that the rational behavior of participants can benefit the network and thus benefit all participants.

Deep into the underlying logic of Filecoin economy

 The Filecoin economic model is based on data storage. Storage miners play a central role in ensuring consensus on the chain and providing storage services. The Filecoin blockchain uses its block rewards to subsidize consensus participation on the chain and provide available storage services. The current main source of income for miners to participate in mining.

The life cycle of miners, create miners on the chain, acquire tokens and promise capacity to the network, start to produce blocks when the minimum miner size is reached, transact with users, upgrade the committed capacity sector to a transactional sector and get extra Transaction revenue, declaration and repair of failures.

Most blockchain networks without access restrictions require resources to participate in consensus. Filecoin must also contribute resources to obtain security. Filecoin storage miners are the providers of storage services and the maintainers of consensus on the chain. Like many other blockchain networks, in order to ensure storage stability and network consensus security, storage miners need to pledge a certain amount of tokens when adding sectors. Filecoin network rewards

On this basis, in order to minimize the burden on miners, the Filecoin network has designed three different pledge mechanisms:

1. Initial pledge: The initial pledge consists of two parts: storage pledge and consensus pledge. The storage pledge must be small enough to allow miners to join the network, while being able to deal with early failures, fines and fees. The consensus pledge depends on the sector's weighted byte computing power (QAP) and network circulation supply. Equivalent to 20 days of block reward + equivalent to 30% of the FIL circulating supply.

2. Block rewards as pledge: Block rewards are used to lock warehouses to reduce the initial token pledge requirements. In order to ensure that incentives are compatible as much as possible, Filecoin will penalize miners who fail to complete the promised period. Therefore, the block reward unlocking scheme is a necessary sub-linear release achieved by a short-term delay plus a fixed-term linear release. The initial parameter is that the unlocking delay period is set as 20 days + the linear release period is set as 180 days after the delay period.

3. Storage transaction provider pledge: Establish an incentive mechanism between miners and users to make miners stand out in the market. The agreement requires a minimum pledge to provide a minimum storage guarantee. If the transaction order withdrawal is terminated, this part of the pledge will be punished.

In the initial stage of the Filecoin network operation, the main income of miner nodes comes from block rewards and user data storage payment fees. However, when the network runs smoothly and the storage of high-quality value data reaches the corresponding volume, the value of retrieval income will be highlighted. The official It is expected that the later retrieval income will be much higher than the sum of the block reward and storage incentive.

Mining the core elements of the economic model

 Filecoin officials believe that many project parties simply decay exponentially. This economic model can only provide short-term economic incentives, but for Filecoin distributed storage projects, if this model is used, it is very likely to cause storage miners to package storage as soon as possible. Block rewards for mining and over-investment in hardware. After consuming these early block rewards, the cashout is completed, and the network will no longer be operated and maintained. This will undoubtedly lead to the loss of user data and fail to complete long-term safe and effective storage. The miner nodes of network storage also have no additional motivation to improve the network, forming a vicious circle, which may eventually lead to the abortion of the project.

After Filecoin's own island economy takes shape, it needs to obtain the pirate universal token FIL if it wants to trade with island producers, but the over-issuance of FIL will undoubtedly directly or indirectly harm the interests of all participants.

Therefore, the official decided not to use the traditional time linear minting FIL coin, but innovatively adopted the "block reward benchmark casting" method closely linked to the network utility to estimate the network utility.

The biggest purpose of this method is to make the FIL currency output speed and the growth rate of network utility have a positive correlation, which is more in line with the economic law of distributed storage projects and is more sustainable. The method of “block reward benchmark casting” is to encourage the consistency of storage landing and long-term storage investment rather than just rapid packaging.

At the same time, this method will increase the block reward as the total storage power of the network increases. This not only preserves the structure of the original exponential decay model, but also improves it in the initial stages of network startup. Once the network reaches the baseline, it will issue the same block reward as the linear decay model, but if the network does not reach the pre-established threshold, it will delay a part of the block reward.

According to the design of the Filecoin economic model, the "simple casting mechanism" allocates 30% of the storage and mining quota, and the remaining 70% for the "benchmark casting". 30% simple casting can provide reaction force and resistance to fragility when the network is impacted.

The base line capacity of the casting share can start from a small percentage of today's global storage, then it will grow rapidly and reach a higher but still reasonable global storage ratio in the future. Initially, the network baseline will start at 1EiB (this figure is less than 0.01% of today's global storage capacity), and it will grow at a rate of 200% every year (higher than the 40% annual growth rate of world storage capacity). When the amount of storage provided by the network is about 1-10% of global storage, the community can decide together to slow the growth rate.

Filecoin tokens are a limited resource. Just like consuming any public pool resources, the speed of token generation in the network should be controlled to maximize net benefits for the community. The purpose of benchmark casting is:

1. Reward participants based on the provided storage rather than simply exponentially based on joining time.

2. Maintain a relatively stable block reward flow for a longer period of time based on the network utility valuation.

Token distribution and punishment mechanism that investors care most about

 Many users who invest in Filecoin are most concerned about the release cycle of FIL, which is related to their investment return cycle. This report details the release and reward and punishment mechanism of the token.

The official understands and adjusts the incentive measures for participants based on the concept of a sector’s one-day income. The reward release mechanism is that the unlock delay period is set to 20 days, and the linear release is 180 days after the delay period. This means that the block rewards will be locked for 20 days first, and then released linearly according to the 180-day period. This model is undoubtedly a blow for investors who want to pay back in a short period of time (two months), but It laid the economic cornerstone for the stable development of the entire network.

Maintaining the security and stability of the storage network is the fundamental purpose of the previous test network operations, including the ongoing space test. The true security and stability are based on the technology of the due diligence of miners around the world, but if the miner node fails to perform due diligence due to evil or negligence, it will also be punished. The unit of punishment is mainly carried out in a sectoral mode.

Sector failure fee: equivalent to the estimated block reward of 2.14 days.

Sector failure detection fee: equivalent to an estimated block reward of 5.00 days.

Sector termination fee: Estimated number of days the sector has received block rewards, up to 90 days.

Network transaction fee: Based on the dynamic fee structure of network congestion.

Points of concern for later project development

1. The Filecoin network will refer to BTC's BIP and ETH's EIP model to design its own FIP method to govern the future direction of the network, but the details of the FIP process have not yet been determined. After the mainnet is launched, all parameters and mechanism updates will be determined through FIP.

2. Develop the Filecoin lending model . Token holders can lend their tokens to the mining work as a third-party pledge, and cooperate with miners to diversify the risk of market fluctuations and obtain benefits.

Third, general smart contracts may be adopted, and improvements to the Filecoin blockchain will be able to use general smart contracts and on-chain state machines.

4. Encourage storage miners to promise capacity to the network when there is no storage demand. Sectors with no transaction orders are called promised easy sectors. As long as the miners prove the supply and storage operation and maintenance capabilities, they can get orders when storage needs, and get Additional transaction income.