On the eve of the mainnet launch, Filecoin's pre-staking rules sparked controversy

This time it is finally confirmed. On September 28, 2020, Filecoin officially announced in a blog post that the Filecoin mainnet will be officially launched when the space test epoch reaches 148888.

As of now, according to the Filfox browser data, the current FIlecoin block height is 145530. If nothing unexpected happens, Filecoin will reach 148888 before 11 pm on October 15, and then complete the mainnet launch.

However, just one day before the launch of the Filecoin mainnet, the mining company Anti-Entropy Technology issued the "Anti-Entropy Technology Sales Suspension Announcement."

The announcement stated that the Filecoin mainnet is about to be launched, but due to the unclear mainnet rules, the possibility of official adjustments to the existing economic model cannot be ruled out. Therefore, Anti-Entropy Technology decided to suspend all sales activities.

For this reason, Deepchain Finance specifically consulted a person related to Anti-Entropy Technology, who said that the current Filecoin pledge and release rules have caused widespread dissatisfaction among miners. Although there is still one day to go online, we decided to suspend sales and wait for news before the official response.

Coincidentally, just today, another Filecoin miner, Diancun Technology, also caused an uproar among miners because of the remarks made by its CEO.

Some players said that Diancun’s CEO announced that all miners need to purchase 350FIL as pre-collateral after the mainnet goes online. If they do not buy it, they can only mine 0.5 per month.

Although the statement later received an official response from Diancun Technology, stating that the above statement was misinterpreted, in fact, miners only need to complete the pledge of 350 FIL within 90 days. In addition to the rewards from the first round of the space race, miners can also obtain 0.5 FIL every day for 180 consecutive days. Therefore, miners do not need to prepare 350 FIL.

But despite this, the majority of miners still don't buy it.

The reason is that miners still need to prepare at least 305 FIL on their own before they can participate in mining activities after the Filecoin mainnet is launched.

The mainnet is about to go online, but insufficient pre-collateral FIL is still a problem for miners

In fact, the issue of pre-staking has been discussed among miners for a long time.

Filecoin officials said in an AMA on October 1 that they plan to migrate all sectors in Space Race 1 and 2 to the mainnet. The FIL pledged by these sectors and the block rewards obtained will also be migrated to the mainnet to reward miners who helped with stress testing, protocol improvements, and prepared for the mainnet launch throughout the Space Race.

This part of computing power is mortgaged using test coins during the test network period, which can be seen as an incentive from Filecoin officials to early participating miners, and is also an important part of the launch of the Filecoin mainnet.

Therefore, once the Filecoin mainnet is launched, miners must pay real FIL tokens as pre-collateral to ensure normal computing power growth.

The Filecoin mortgage mechanism is divided into two parts: block reward mortgage and pre-mortgage.

Block reward pledge means that the block rewards obtained by miners will be released and unlocked linearly within 180 days, so miners can only get the full reward 180 days after mining the block, and the disposable FIL obtained in the early stage of block production is very small.

Pre-collateralization means that miners need to provide tokens for collateral before packaging sectors to ensure that miners can complete the promised life cycle of the sector and will not harm the security of the network for short-term interests. Currently, the collateral amount of a single sector is about 0.25 FIL.

In the early stage of the mainnet launch, the tokens that can be used for pre-mortgage mainly consist of three parts: block rewards generated by the existing computing power on the mainnet, reward tokens generated by the space race, and unlocking of official and early investor shares.

However, since all of the above FIL tokens have a linear release period of at least 6 months, the circulation of FIL will be very low in the first 6 months, and the available rewards generated by miners’ own mining will hardly meet the requirements for pre-collateralization of new sectors. This will become the number one problem that miners need to solve in the early stage of the mainnet launch.

It is understood that if the average computing power growth rate of the test network since the start of the space race is estimated at 10 PiB/day, the entire network will need to package 327,680 sectors every day after the Filecoin mainnet is launched.

If the current pre-mortgage of 0.25 FIL per sector is maintained, the demand for pre-mortgage tokens on the entire network will be as high as 82,000 FIL per day.

At present, the mining rewards generated by the network are only 124,000 FIL per day, which needs to be released linearly after 180 days. If factors such as fluctuations in network computing power and changes in block reward distribution are not taken into account, the mining output in the first few months of the main network is far from meeting the network's pre-mortgage demand of 82,000 FIL per day.

This requires miners to go to the secondary market to purchase FIL to complete the pledge.

However, the main network has not yet been launched, and the FIL on major exchanges is only a futures contract. How can players talk about mortgage?

Previously, Xi'an Lingdong's Yan Zitong told Deepchain Finance that at this stage in the Filecoin industry, both miners and miners are generally dissatisfied with Protocol Labs. If Protocol Labs still insists on its own way and ignores the voices of Chinese players, the result may be "exciting".