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 Expenses Methodology

## 1. Overview

Filecoin expenses represents the daily operational costs of the Filecoin network, calculated as the sum of token incentives distributed to network participants. This metric measures the total FIL tokens issued daily through mining rewards and reserve distributions, converted to USD value. The calculation captures the economic cost of maintaining the Filecoin decentralized storage network by tracking all token emissions that incentivize storage providers and network security.

## 2. Data sources

- **Filecoin network rewards data**: Daily snapshots of cumulative FIL token rewards from the Filecoin blockchain, collected via automated scraping
- **Mining rewards**: FIL tokens earned by storage providers for proving storage capacity and maintaining network consensus
- **Reserve distributions**: FIL tokens distributed from the Filecoin Foundation reserve for network development and incentives  
- **End-of-day price feeds**: CoinGecko price data for FIL token to enable USD conversion
- **Token metadata**: FIL token information including symbol and CoinGecko identifier for price lookups

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Raw incentives extraction
- **Purpose**: Extracts and categorizes different types of FIL token incentives from scraped Filecoin network data
- **Logic**: The system processes scraped rewards data to identify two main incentive categories. For mined FIL, it extracts rewards earned by storage providers through the proof-of-spacetime consensus mechanism. For reserve distributions, it captures FIL tokens disbursed from the Filecoin Foundation reserve for ecosystem development. Each record includes the daily timestamp, chain identifier, component name describing the incentive source, and the raw FIL amount
- **Key fields**: `daily_timestamp` for the date, `chain` as filecoin, `contract_name` describing incentive source, `incentive_type` specifying mined_fil or reserve_disbursed_fil, `token_symbol` as FIL, and `amount` containing the raw token quantity

### Component B: Cumulative to daily conversion  
- **Purpose**: Converts cumulative reward amounts from the scraper into daily increment values
- **Logic**: Since the scraped data contains cumulative totals rather than daily amounts, the system uses a lag window function to calculate daily increments. For each incentive type and date, it subtracts the previous day's cumulative total from the current day's total. For the first record in each series where no previous value exists, it uses the full cumulative amount as the daily value. This transformation ensures each record represents the actual FIL tokens distributed on that specific day
- **Key fields**: `amount` field transformed from cumulative to daily increments using lag calculation partitioned by `contract_name` and ordered by `daily_timestamp`

### Component C: USD conversion and formatting
- **Purpose**: Converts daily FIL amounts to USD values and structures data for metric reporting
- **Logic**: The daily FIL incentive amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day CoinGecko price feeds for the FIL token. The conversion macro matches each daily FIL amount with the corresponding USD price for that date. The data is then formatted with business categorization fields including blockchain as the business line, blockchains_l1 as the market sector, and blockchain as the business segment. Timestamp formatting sets the grain to daily and establishes filecoin as the chain identifier
- **Key fields**: `token_incentives` containing USD-converted values, `timestamp` set to daily grain, `chain_id` as filecoin, and business classification fields

### Final aggregation  
- **Combining components**: The expenses metric directly uses the token incentives calculation, simply renaming the `token_incentives` field to `expenses` to reflect that these token emissions represent the operational costs of the Filecoin network
- **Currency conversion**: FIL token amounts are converted to USD using end-of-day CoinGecko price feeds, ensuring consistent valuation across time periods
- **Time aggregation**: Data is aggregated at daily boundaries, with each record representing the total FIL incentives distributed on a specific calendar day
- **Final calculation**: The final expenses value equals the sum of daily mined FIL rewards and reserve distributions, converted to USD. This represents the total cost in USD terms of incentivizing storage providers and funding network operations for each day

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

Total project operating and incentive expenses.

FilecoinFIL

Expenses

Expenses

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