Staking mechanism: Filecoin Space Race pledges 2 million FIL

As of 11:00 on August 30, the current block height of the Filecoin test network is 16474, the effective computing power of the entire network is 54.71PB, the total pledged amount is about 2.0098 million FIL, the number of active miners is 326, the reward per block is 8.1369 FIL, and the average mining income in 24 hours is 1.63 FIL/TB. According to the competition requirements, 500,000 FIL rewards have been unlocked.

Data shows that the computing power income of the Force Zone node t02438 is 22.38 FIL/T, which is the first effective node except for the official Protocol Lab node.

At present, the issue that everyone is most concerned about should be the pledge mechanism. On August 28, the official economic model was officially announced, which mentioned the pledge mechanism.

The security of a network requires a certain attack cost to prevent it from being attacked, and this attack cost is reflected in the Filecoin network through the use of a staking mechanism.

Filecoin has three different staking mechanisms : initial staking, block rewards as staking, and storage transaction provider staking. The first is that miners must provide Filecoin as an initial commitment for each sector. The second mechanism is to reduce the initial token staking requirements by locking block rewards . The third establishes an incentive mechanism between miners and users to make miners stand out in the market .

1. Initial pledge

The initial pledge consists of two parts: storage pledge and consensus pledge .

Storage pledges guarantee the quality of service of the network for users and provide a launch guarantee for sectors in case of penalties. Storage pledges must be small enough to allow miners to join the network, but large enough that the pledge can cover early failures, fines, and fees. Locking block rewards and using unlocked rewards as additional collateral can reduce the initial storage pledge without breaking the consistency of network incentives.

The balance is currently reached by using an initial storage pledge corresponding to an amount that is approximately enough to cover 7 days of sector failure fees and 1 sector failure detection fee . This is usually calculated using the number of days of future expected revenue from the sector.

While storage staking provides a clear path to determine whether a sector should be added, it does not provide adequate long-term security for the network; as block rewards decrease, the cost of disrupting consensus decreases. Therefore, the second half of the initial stake , the consensus stake, depends on the sector's weighted byte power ( QAP ) and the network's circulating supply .

When the network is at or above the baseline , the goal is to have approximately 30 % of the network's circulating supply locked in the initial consensus stake. This is achieved by simply allocating a small portion of the stake to a sector based on its proportion of the network's weighted byte power.

With the baseline growing, the initial stake per unit sector weighted byte hashrate QAP should decrease over time , just as other mining costs decrease over time.

2. Block Reward Staking

In order to reduce the initial stake that miners need to provide, unlocked block rewards are also used as stake. If a sector is terminated before expiration, the block rewards obtained by the sector will be penalized.

The block reward unlocking scheme is a short-term delay plus a fixed-term linear release to achieve the necessary sub- linear release . The initial parameters suggest setting the unlocking delay period to 20 days and the linear release period to 180 days after the delay period .

In general, penalty fees are deducted from the earliest unlocked locked block rewards first , and then from the miner's account balance . When the miner's account balance is below the minimum requirement, the miner's ability to participate in mining, win block rewards and increase storage computing power will be restricted until the miner recharges the account balance and meets the minimum requirement.

3. Storage provider transaction pledge

The protocol requires a minimum pledge to provide a minimum storage guarantee, and this part of the pledge will be punished if the transaction order is terminated early. However, miners can provide higher transaction pledges, which means providing a higher level of and more reliable service to potential users.

Under the premise of higher pledge, users may pledge additional transactions beyond the minimum value, which is positively correlated with the reliability of data storage. This pledge will be returned to the storage provider after the transaction order in the sector is successfully completed .