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THIS DOC IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. Feel free to comment or add ideas, but be aware that some parts may be updated later.

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Intro

Motivation:

The Filecoin network today subsidizes storage capacity with block rewards and storage deals with the FIL+ program. However, it has become clear that a network priority is getting adoption for paid deals, especially driving onchain paid deals.

For this reason, in this document we want to explore different approaches to incentivize onchain payments.

This document aims to: List plausible options with a preliminary level of formality, gather initial feedback and concerns.

Next steps: We will likely need to conduct more detailed modeling and simulation for the most promising alternatives to determine which one to implement.

Long-Term Vision

We envision Filecoin as a programmable, pay-for-service economy. We want to bake incentivizing the adoption (and creation) of composable services built around transparent onchain payments into the Filecoin core economy, ideally in an algorithmic way. Fil+ will remain as a social coordination layer that can check compliance and good behavior on top of services.

Disclaimer:

Filecoin will have 2 main payment systems:

• f05 market payment (actor native)
• FS payment (to be deployed on mainnet in July)

What follows is focused on incentivizing adoption of the second method, FS payment, because it is the one in design and includes a fee. How to and if incentivize the existing f05 payment (without fee) remains an open question.

General considerations (aka setting the model):

• Ideally, we want a situation where the incentive > gasFee + paymentFee for each single payment (i.e., settlement event) in most cases (i.e., for average values of base fee; when base fee is very high, this may not be possible).
• But gasFee can vary significantly due to base fee volatility. So, for simplicity in this design brainstorming phase, we'll focus on having incentive > paymentFee and ignore gas cost for now.