Data puzzle: What is the real circulation of Filecoin? How much test coins have been converted into real coins? How much money has been taken advantage of?

Special author: Bu Meng Editor: Wu Shuo Blockchain

After the mainnet went live, the Filecoin team launched an AMA event for the community on October 21. Many questions were answered and answered, and based on information from all parties, today we would like to expand and discuss two key issues:

1. Currently, test coins are circulated as "real coins". What are their sources? What are their uses? (There have been many rumors that big miners received tens of millions of test coins that were converted into real coins and dumped them.)

2. What are the details of the implementation of FIP-0004? How much selling pressure (coin volume) will be added to the market every day after its implementation? (The core of FIP-0004 is to reduce the pressure on miners, and 25% will be released immediately)

Official explanation for the outflow of test coins as test coins

The official explanation for converting the test coins into real coins is that before the mainnet was launched, on September 27, the official wrote in its blog that "the Space Race testnet will continue to run and will gradually enter the mainnet through protocol upgrades and state transitions in the next 3 weeks."

The official message was that everyone should be able to understand that the official would not fork the chain, so there would be no distinction between "test coins" and "real coins". However, the official did not make it clear at the first time, and it has been changing, leading to external misunderstandings.

The authorities hope that through this smooth transition, all miners can enter the main network pre-mining in advance, giving all miners a period of free staking and computing power before the private and public offering quotas are released.

When the mainnet is launched, the huge computing power and sealed storage blades built during the testnet, including the profits and rewards obtained throughout the space race, will belong to the miners. When the network is upgraded, these test coins will be converted to the mainnet FIL.

It is equivalent to that miners received official airdrop rewards after this round of mainnet launch, and the airdrop is the 0-cost test currency received from the "faucet" during the space race. Perhaps the official wants to "bind" and "win over" the miners.

How many test coins are circulating in the market?

In the official AMA, the official pointed out that the coins in the wallet addresses of its Protocol Labs and Foundation have not been transferred out. The coins currently circulating in the market mainly come from three sources: unlocked mining rewards, unlocked SAFT tokens, and FIL reserved for stabilizing the market and lending (almost all of which are unused).

After verification, it was confirmed that 2.68% of the coins in the Foundation and Protocol Labs wallets have been unlocked, but not transferred out.

Therefore, a large part of the coins currently circulating in the market come from the test coins of Space Race 1 and Space Race 2. All of these test coins are officially distributed to miners. 55% will be issued first, and 15% will be reserved for future retrieval miners.

All miners’ coins come from one address (regardless of whether they are the faucet test coins at the time or the real coins mined currently)——f02:

The creation time was exactly 6:00 am on August 25, when the first phase of the space race began. According to official statements, 55% was distributed to miners, so the balance of this part should be 1.1 billion. As of 8:00 pm on October 22, the balance of the account was 1092244887.64.

So the official mining + test coin outflow should be:

1100000000-1092244887.64=7755112.36 (7.75 million FIL), so theoretically, the test coins circulating in the market should not exceed 7 million. According to official statements, most of them are used for staking. The staking data shows 13.12 million because it includes unlocked rewards, and the coins put into staking are far less than that.

According to Filscan, there are currently 21.17 million coins in circulation, of which 10 million are officially unused coins (i.e. the FIL reserved for market stabilization and lending as mentioned above). Therefore, corresponding to the on-chain data, there are about 11.27 million coins in circulation in the market.

From the 11.27 million coins, minus 1.5 million (upper limit) of circulating funds used for "market making"; minus 351,000 FIL released every day by the SAFT account for 8 days, this part now totals about 3 million coins, minus a small amount of unpledged portion in the above-mentioned f02 account, the remaining about 5 million may be the so-called "personal candy".

Personal candy means that each GitHub account will receive 100 FIL test coins. This part has a stronger wool-grabbing attribute. The official also stated that hundreds of accounts were banned, but from the current point of view, there should be tens of thousands of accounts that have received them and successfully exchanged them for candy.

As for whether these 5 million FILs are the so-called dumping funds, and whether they are mainly owned by mining machine manufacturers, it is unknown at present, unless the official detailed test coin flow data is released. Some people also believe that this part of the candy is a bug that the official has not noticed.

The official set a 25% immediate release of block rewards (FIP-0004), which took effect on Thursday evening

First, let’s make one thing clear: after FIP-0004 comes into effect, it will only be effective for future mining, which means that there will be no centralized release of previously accumulated block rewards. The impact on the current circulation of coins after it comes into effect is 25%-1/180=0.244.

Now that the mainnet has been launched, all pre-collateralized payments are made with real money, so the computing power is growing very slowly.

There will be news that 25% of the block rewards will be released immediately for the computing power after block 170,000, so intuitively it can be judged that this part will not be very large.

After quantitative calculation:

The current growth rate of the computing power of the entire network is about 176T/h, and the daily increase in computing power is 4.125P/day.

Therefore, the daily output of new computing power is only 1013FIL. This incremental FIL is released immediately, and the selling pressure on the market is only 247FIL, which can even be ignored.

In addition, combined with the total circulation of test coins we calculated earlier, the "implementation" of FIP-0004 will not have a significant impact in the short term, but this impact is constantly accumulating and expanding. Its further impact must be considered in conjunction with the FIL ecosystem.