Filecoin miners will now receive 25% of block rewards immediately with no vesting period

Quick Take

  • Filecoin has activated the FIP-004 change at block height 170,000
  • Miners that have installed the upgrade now receive 25% of their block rewards immediately with no vesting 
  • Based on the network’s current 24-hour production, over 40,000 FIL will be released to miners in a day

Filecoin miners that installed the latest network upgrade are now able to access 25% of their block rewards immediately without vesting.

Filecoin's network lead Molly posted in the project's Slack channel on Wednesday that the Lotus 1.1.0 was available for download, which is a mandatory upgrade for those that want to keep participating in the decentralized storage network.

"You must upgrade before epoch 170,000 (Thursday Oct 22 at ~22:40 UTC), or you will lose sync with the chain," she posted in the channel. The network reached the block height 170,000 on Thursday evening EST.

One upgrade feature includes the activation of FIP-004, which is aimed to help "improve miner’s ability to reinvest FIL by making 25% of storage-mining rewards immediately available with no vesting," the post read.

As of the time of writing, Filecoin miners were producing roughly 150K FIL – the network's native cryptocurrency – over the past 24 hours. Based on that rate, more than 40,000 FIL of the daily block rewards would be released to miners under the new system. But it remains to be seen how much of those immediately released FIL will be re-pledged by miners to increase their computing power as opposed to being sold on markets.

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As previously reported, the miner liquidity issue led some participants to hold back their mining growth plans since the network's mainnet went live.

Filecoin's economic design requires miners to pledge FIL as initial collateral in order to seal data into valid network sectors so that they can increase their effective storage mining power.

Before FIP-004, miners' block rewards were released linearly over 180 days. But now they will receive 25% immediately while the remaining 75% will still be vested in the coming six months.

According to data from CoinGecko, Filecoin's current circulating supply is roughly 19.3 million FIL, in addition to over 13 million FIL pledged as collateral by miners.


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About Author

Wolfie joined The Block’s news team in 2020 and switched to the research side in 2021 to focus on crypto mining analysis. Prior to The Block, he had been a journalist at CoinDesk for three years. Wolfie has a background in financial journalism.