Validators process transactions, store information, and receive fees from users (supply-side fees).

Filecoin is a smart contract platform and a data storage network (a blockchain). Filecoin was founded by Juan Benet and launched in 2014.

FIL holders own and govern the protocol. They currently take a cut of the total base fees, miner tips and overestimation fees paid by users and a cut of provecommit batch fees, precommit batch fees and penalty fees paid by miners (revenue). Filecoin’s investors include IOSG Ventures, Winkelvoss Capital, a16z, etc.

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Filecoin

# Filecoin Earnings Methodology

## 1. Overview

Filecoin earnings measures the net profitability of the Filecoin protocol by calculating the difference between protocol revenue and protocol expenses. This metric answers the fundamental question of whether the Filecoin network generates more value from user fees than it pays out in token incentives to maintain network security and operations. The calculation follows the standard financial formula: Earnings = Revenue - Expenses.

## 2. Data sources

The earnings calculation relies on three primary raw data sources:

- **Filecoin blockchain fee data**: Daily transaction fees, base fee burns, overestimation burns, precommit batch fees, provecommit batch fees, penalty fees, and miner tips scraped directly from the Filecoin blockchain
- **Filecoin blockchain rewards data**: Cumulative mining rewards and reserve disbursements scraped directly from the Filecoin blockchain, including newly mined FIL tokens and FIL distributed from protocol reserves  
- **External price data**: End-of-day price feeds for FIL token from CoinGecko API for USD conversion

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Revenue calculation
- **Purpose**: Calculates protocol revenue from various fee types burned or collected by the network
- **Logic**: Extracts all fee types from scraped Filecoin blockchain data including `base_fee_burn`, `overestimation_burn`, `precommit_batch_fee_burn`, `provecommit_batch_fee_burn`, `penalty_fee_burn`, and `miner_tip`. However, miner tips are explicitly excluded from revenue calculation since they represent direct payments to miners rather than protocol revenue. Only burned fees and penalties that accrue to the protocol are included as revenue. Each fee type is processed as a separate component with daily timestamps and native FIL amounts.
- **Key fields**: Daily timestamp, fee type classification, and `fee_amount` in native FIL tokens

### Component B: Expenses calculation  
- **Purpose**: Calculates protocol expenses from token incentives paid to network participants
- **Logic**: Sources token incentive data from scraped Filecoin rewards including two main types: `mined_fil` representing newly created FIL tokens through mining, and `reserve_disbursed_fil` representing FIL distributed from protocol reserves. Since the raw scraped data contains cumulative totals rather than daily amounts, the calculation uses window functions to convert cumulative values to daily increments by subtracting the previous day's cumulative total from the current day's total for each incentive type. This gives the actual daily token incentive amounts.
- **Key fields**: Daily timestamp, incentive type, and daily incremental `amount` in native FIL tokens

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Revenue and expenses are calculated separately then combined using the subtract operation where earnings equals total daily revenue minus total daily expenses
- **Currency conversion**: Both revenue and expenses are converted from native FIL tokens to USD using end-of-day FIL price feeds from CoinGecko applied to the daily amounts
- **Time aggregation**: Data is aggregated to daily grain with timestamps representing calendar days, and gaps are filled with zeros for any missing dates to ensure complete time series
- **Final calculation**: The final earnings metric represents the daily net profitability where positive values indicate the protocol generated more revenue than expenses, and negative values indicate the protocol paid out more in incentives than it collected in fees

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

Net profit (also profits, net income, profitability) — revenue remaining after subtracting expenses.

FilecoinFIL

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