Authors: Irene & Luca

Date: June 9, 2025

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(16th June 2025) For the most recent doc see How to Upgrade Filecoin's Revenue Structure to Incentivize On-Chain Payments (and Service Creation)?

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🎯 Framing the Opportunity

As Juan often describes, Filecoin should be treated as a self-contained economy, akin to a state, with its own native currency (FIL) and four types of economic flows:

• Internal business: services paid in FIL
• Consumption: FIL burned (e.g. gas)
• Imports: FIL sold for other currencies
• Exports: FIL bought to access Filecoin services

And two keys goals for Filecoin economy are:

• Goal 1: To increase exports (buy FIL to access services)
• Goal 2: To increase consumption (FIL burned or removed from circulation), where we have
  • Burn > Locking > Holding: Burning FIL is the strongest signal of value accrual. Locking reduces velocity temporarily. Holding FIL indirectly helps, especially via USDFC.

While for Goal 1 we already have things in motion to get us there (indeed, efforts like FS Marketplace, PDP, and FilCDN expand Filecoin’s service offerings and bring in paying users ⇒ increasing FIL demand from external actors), we don’t have a clear path for Goal 2

🚀 Proposal: aligning Filecoin Revenue Structure to Drive On-Chain Activity and Token Consumption Behavior

Luca and I propose to focus on increasing FIL burning and locking, which can be done in two main steps:

🧩 Step 1: Incentivize On-Chain Payments & Token Locking

Filecoin block rewards are currently 100% tied to storage onboarding. We propose a new reward logic where: