Filecoin (FIL): Real Storage Demand or Empty Capacity? | Daily Crypto IQ

So Filecoin again one of the easiest projects to explain how it's relevant. The world produces more data every year than and most of that information sits with small number of cloud providers is what I was starting to say. So it's almost very much a monopoly in the centralized world of storage right or data storage. Filecoin offers an open market where independent providers store data and use cryptographic proofs to demonstrate that they're actually doing the work, right? And that sounds like an obvious reason for the token to exist, but it's not simply about does Filecoin work, does Filecoin store anything. This is the token autopsy. Does the Filecoin coin actually have a purpose and relevance inside that ecosystem? Melissa says, "I'm working this corporate night dinner hangout gathering and the karaoke I have to listen to is beyond horrible. They

need Blues Guy." That's funny. Blues Guy get It's only like a It's only what? It's only like an 18 hour drive. You can make it there. All right. So the more important question here about Filecoin is whether the network actually has economic activity strong enough to support file the token without depending indefinitely on block rewards subsidized storage or incentives. A very similar idea as a lot of the stuff we were talking about with Bit Tensor and it subsidizing its own ecosystem. So, Filecoin has already proven that it can attract hardware and onboard enormous data sets. And what was it like 772 million in market cap right now at its lows? That's that's actually better than I thought it was. So now it must prove that customers will actually pay for decentralized data and that those payments create meaningful value

for file the coin because even if customers pay the treasury of file coin right and not the actual coin. This could be a little bit uh confusing as we go through the autopsy. So you have Filecoin, right, is the name of the project, but Fil is the ticker for the coin. I believe that's right. Spike the punch with you're hilarious, Cam. So Monday we talked about arbitum, right? And Tuesday we talked about bit tensor. Tonight we are into decentralized physical infrastructure and investigation into filecoin. Filecoin is not merely a blockchain with strong narrative. It operates a functioning marketplace uses cryptographic storage proofs and requires providers to pledge Filecoin and has an onboarded substantial amount of real data. However, Filecoin's own 2026 strategy acknowledges that the next challenge is no longer building more capacity. The priority is creating paid onchain

demand and improving the network economics, which I would agree with. They need to improve the economics because I've been in the coin a long time, although I've never really done a deep dive and I bought it a long time ago before I really started to raise my crypto IQ. Hopefully, you want to raise your crypto IQ. Smash that like button. But um I it it hasn't been the best price uh dis not discovery but the best price uh relationship there with the coin. And so that's why I feel like this is so needed even for me because I want to know do I get out of this thing when I hit break even an old coin that I bought right on less information that I understand now here in crypto and a lot of you might have coins that

are similar to that. So feel free to put that in the chat coins that we should maybe go over because maybe you need to know is this actually have some good economic demand for the coin inside its ecosystem or is the coin kind of isolated from the ecosystem and the flow of money and if it ever breaks even maybe I get out of it right and get into something else. So we'll answer that by the end of the show. So, Filecoin has built sustainable decentralized storage economy, an impressive network that relies too heavily on token incentive. Maybe we're going to find that out. [snorts] So, we're going to separate file into three layers, right? Because Filecoin just off RIP is a project that supplies data storage or storage, right? Well, that alone doesn't make it very easy for us

to talk about. So we need to break it down into the many layers that it actually is. So first the product decentralized cryptographic verifiable storage. Second is the marketplace where customers providers storage deals uh retrievalss and payments live. And the third is the token itself. [music] FIL is the ticker file and it's used for collateral payments gas rewards and burns. A project can succeed at the first layer without proving the second or third and the scorecard will will reflect those differences instead of giving Filecoin credit merely because large quantities of data exist on that network. Just because they store something doesn't mean the Filecoin is going to be highly relevant. So here's the tension that we want to keep in mind. And I try to build all of these with some tension and I mean the weekly series, right?

Why why do we do Bit Tenser, right? [music] Why are we doing filecoin now? There's a certain tension that are similar. [music] Filecoin has real storage capability, real data, and real cryptographic proofs and real institutional use cases. But stored bytes are not the same thing as paying customers. A token reward can persuade someone to provide storage. A subsidy can persuade someone to upload data. neither automatically proves that an independent customer values the service enough to pay sustainable prices or repetitively be a customer without that subsidy. So the autopsy begins when we separate activity from demand. And let's move it over so you guys can see some notes here as we kick this thing off. A lot of information to give you guys tonight. Bang. The token autopsy thesis. So, Filecoin has proven that decentralized storage can operate at enormous

scale, which alone is pretty cool actually if you kind of think about everything that we already have centralized and centralized companies and stuff. Well, if you really believe in the original ethos of blockchain or Bitcoin, you might say, well, then you would have you'd be inclined to want to see things become decentralized. And decentralization comes with its own challenges. One of the main challenges is oftent times governance, right? Who gets to decide what's going on when nobody has full control? Because decentralization basically means nobody has full control over it. So what is even actually decentralized in this asset class of decentralization? Not everything is. And so we got to separate these things. So it is not yet proven that paid storage demand and token uh value capture which you hear me say a lot can replace subsidy dependent growth.

Now we said the same thing and I want to point this out earlier on in the token autopsy. We said the same thing when it came to Bit Tensor. Don't let the subsidy within the ecosystem make you think that there's something wrong with it because tech and new tech, emerging tech, a lot of time puts a lot of money up front to get things going and it's what's really required because you would never be able to get things going. Uh, a real quick example of this would be like a robotics industry, right? Not even talking about AI necessarily, just literally robots that do things, right? Or robotics in general. Not so much humanoid robots, but we've had robotics for a long time. Uh those companies that build those things have to put up enormous amounts of money because every

prototype that they build cost a ton of money. But when they get it right and then they get it into the warehouses and they get it into the Amazons and they get it in everywhere, then they make all their money back many, many, many times over. But you still have to have that initial money. So subsidy is nothing new in the tech world. Filecoin's 2026 strategy explicitly shifts the ecosystem away from expanding supply and towards paid onchain deals, provider profitability, and sustainable network economics. What's the problem with that? Well, Filecoin is frequently judged using impressive storage numbers. So they hit you with the data things like network capacity, data stored, number of deals that they have going on, institutional data sets, storage provider participation, then those metrics, well they can paint a different idea. So those m uh measurements

or metrics show activity and technical capability shows what it can do. But remember our focus in a token autopsy is the token. They do not independently reveal how much storage was purchased by paying customers and not subsidized customers. How much revenue providers earned from the customer, right? So the the real customers that were there, how much did the people really earn out of that money and how much went to like Filecoin itself or a foundation? How much activity depended on enhancing token rewards? whether storage payments created file token demand and whether customer revenue can support providers without subsidies. This is laying out what we're going to be beginning to investigate here. So, the shift is that the correct analysis separates three economic engines within Filecoin. Customer payments, protocol subsidies, and block rewards, and file token locking and burning. And

remember, one of the greatest things that you get to hear in one of these token autopsies is that tokens are being burnt almost like it does matter how many, but so so many coins have no burning mechanism at all. They might have a buyback. We've learned that a lot of them don't even have a buyback. And so, uh, I'm glad to hear that maybe there is some burning involved. Again, smash that like button and subscribe to the channel for these token autopsy deep dives. This one is a little bit special to me because when I came in early into cryptocurrency, I did buy some Filecoin. Um, no telling how down I am probably on that. Not huge amounts of money, right? Cuz I do really believe in not buying more than you can afford to lose, even when I

was buying mostly spot bags. But it was definitely a couple hundred bucks. And I I couldn't honestly tell you what my average buy was, but I would like to know if there's any light at the end of the tunnel for this file coin here. And that also tells you I've been following it for a while. But I wasn't used to digging into how everything actually runs in its ecosystem. So Filecoin becomes economically sustainable when customers payments and not like when customers pay and not just newly issued file supports providers in producing token demand for file. So you have what's called emissions. So there are your max supply which in this case for filecoin is infinite. Then you have the total supply or the circulating supply, right? And so a lot of times the way providers and people who are

contributing to the system are paid is just in new tokens that they just create which can work for quite some time. Also what we're kind of considering subsidizing, right? But at some point, it rather has to be able to attract real paying customers like any other business, right? Or it's over with. So, think of a coffee shop, right? And for the first, I don't know, month or even two, uh, they got deep pockets, right? They started this coffee shop. They had a bunch of money. They give away a free coffee to anybody who comes through the door every day, right? Well, they can only do that for so long. Now, on the surface, you might look at this coffee shop in the first month that it's opening be like maybe you don't know they give away free coffee, right?

You live under a rock, but you drive by it in the morning and you look at that coffee shop and you think, "Wow, that coffee shop is absolutely busy as heck. Everybody loves their coffee. Their coffee must be amazing." And so, a month goes by, two months goes by, and they decide, "All right, we've given people tons of coffee. Everybody in this city's pretty much tried our coffee at this point. It cost us a ton of money. Now it's time to make those people pay for the coffee. And let's see how much they really like the coffee and how much the customers are really willing to pay money for our coffee. And then they turn off the free coffee and barely anybody walks through the door. And what do you think happens next? they fold and they wasted a

bunch of money and gave a bunch of free coffee. At that point, they're basically a charity. Well, that idea is the same thing when you're giving away coins that are newly minted to people inside the ecosystem as an incentive or a reward or payment, if you will, for being a part of the system and then you hit your max supply, stuff like that. There's some reason why you have to cut down the rewards. Well, then people stop providing service. This comes up a lot in a lot of these different ecosystem deep dives. It's why I wanted to take a minute to really try to explain it with some kind of metaphor. Cam says they should have put cocaine in the coffee, bro. Hey, hey, hey, they would have been coming back. That's for sure. I mean, they did it

for with Coca-Cola for all those years. All right, let's get back on track. My metaphor might have just derailed us just a little bit, right? So the payoff is the distinction helps us determine whether Filecoin is a useful decentralized storage product, a sustainable marketplace in itself, decentralized data storage, a token with durable value capture. So let's get into this thing. But what you may not know, this is one of my favorite segments to do because it's a couple little factoids to kick this thing off that are interesting that you might not have any idea about. Melissa says, "See you guys. I have to go to work." Sorry to hear that. Thank you for coming and hanging out with us for when you could. So, IPFS and Filecoin are related, but they're not identical. So, IPFS locates and transfers content.

Filecoin adds economic incentive and enforcable storage commitments. Fiocoin does not simply trust providers to claim they stored something. That's what the blockchain's for, right? Providers submit cryptographic proofs demonstrating that the data was replicated and continues to be stored. That's nice because if we have that data online in the blockchain, then we could audit it and we could prove things are really going on for the the value that's being given to the people providing data storage. So, storage capacity does not equal stored customer data. Store customer data does not necessarily equal paid demand. And I bet you didn't know that Filecoin Plus historical gave verified data a 10x quantity [music] power multiplier and that increased provider rewards. But Filecoin accepted Solstice proposal argues that verification became an unreliable measurement for useful economic activity. So this looks like there was some

kind of solstice proposal and they were having some issues here. Did you know that storage providers must pledge file as collateral? That's a good sign. Failed storage commitment can lead to penalties or slashing. Slashing is where they take your money for you messing up. CCP hilarious. All right. Gas fees and penalties permanently burn Filecoin. That's a plus. But we know that there's a maximum infinite maximum supply. The 2 billion Filecoin figure is a protocol maximum. The full amount will never circulate because file is continually burned. This is interesting because this here is saying there's a two billion file protocol maximum, but on Coin Gecko it clearly says max supply infinite total supply 1.9 billion and an outstanding supply and of course a circulating supply. And uh if you don't know what an outstanding supply is, we'll have to cover

that at another time. That's for sure. Okay. So, let's assume that there is like a two billion uh total supply and there will never be more than that apparently is what they're trying to say from the documents on Filecoin's own website. And of course, that's docs.filecoin.io for anybody who wants to check that out. So, market data providers you may not know may report a different circulating supply from Filecoin's internal protocol accounting. Always check the definition before comparing supply figures. That's a very good point and we've seen that with a few other projects. Signal versus noise. Chris Goss in the house. 333. My fellow lifer givers gain. Welcome in. Welcome in. So, signal is highly important. Noise not important. Filecoin is prioritizing paid demand signal. Filecoin's official 2026 objective begins with paid onchain deals, provider profitability, and flagship paying customers.

That is meaningful signal because the ecosystem is publicly measuring success by customer economics and not simply capacity growth. Many many people are never going to know the details of Filecoin and what it does if they're even if they even ever look at it enough to really even know what it is on the surface. And so all they're going to measure by is the success of Filecoin's price. The Filecoin token signal is Solstice directly addresses misaligned rewards. So this FIP uh 0118, right, just a number, but no, it's a proposal. I don't know if it passed yet. We'll get to that. Has been accepted and is intended for the Solstice network upgrade. Okay, so this was it looks like it was actually approved. It would retire new Filecoin Plus data cap issuance and redirect part of the block reward towards

services that bring measurable paying activity to the network. So that's what we want to see. We want to see them readress the way things run in their ecosystem. what is actually good for them, their customers, and of course the file token and then adjust things. And it looks like that might be on the way. So I'm I look forward to learning more about this. So as of this build, the associated network upgrade is still being prepared. Okay, that's what I wanted to know. So it's not fully put together and implement implemented. It should not be described as already completed economic transformation. So, whatever you're seeing right now could be speculation about this upgrade, but it's not the actual product of the upgrade. All caught up in the chat. So, what is noise is File's recent price movement. File was

traded around 93 cents 94 cents on September 23rd with approximately 831 million Filecoins circulating and a market capitalization near 780 million. its recent price performance does not prove that storage revenue improved in any other way. That's what we're saying here is like although there was a little bit of an uptick in price, that doesn't really mean that anything major has happened to Filecoin's ecosystem or connection to the coin. Price and trading volume, storage uses and paid demand must be measured separately. broader signal. So important but broader institutions are using blockchain rails and we know this more and more and more through tokenization that we see with everything from Robin Hood chain to Kraken to literally everywhere else Coinbase uh Ono all over the place right so the European Central Bank has launched Pontis to connect its payment system with

blockchainbased financial markets now that does not validate Filecoin specifically right filecoin's probably not even named amongst those things. But it does strengthen the broader case that blockchain infrastructure is moving beyond speculative asset trading. And of course, the more of the world that comes into the more as the crypto asset class, right? Blockchain technology, decentralization ethos, the more some of them might look at Filecoin because one thing Filecoin does actually do is what it says it's going to do, which is provide data storage. And that is a kind of niche market where you have things like Google Cloud, right? You have uh probably AWS cloud, stuff like that, Alibaba cloud, but there's not probably hundreds of companies. So, Filecoin is in a pretty interesting market. And if it really offered any incentive or if it did something drastically different or

easier for the customer to use, it might win a ton of market share. And that would be kind of crazy if you ask me. Because in the traditional world, if a competitor came up against Google, AWS, they just buy the company. But what do you do for Filecoin, right? I guess you try to buy all the coins, shake everybody out of them. Maybe that's what's actually going on. You never know what games are being played behind the surface, right? And let's not pretend that there aren't. So, the central question here is, does Filecoin create standable value for File? To earn a strong score here, the evidence must support this complete chain. So, at the end of the token autopsy, if you're new here, if you are new, drop something in the comment, let me know. There will be a

score and we base all the categories the same for every token. And that score will reflect how we feel about Filecoin's ability to create value for the file token. and it needs an 80 or higher to get a passing rate, which is actually proven to be quite difficult. Most things just watch up uh wind up on a watch list versus a past verdict list. So, customers need verifiable storage. The customer pays for the service. Providers earn sustainable revenue and network uses lock spins or burns of the file token. File token issuance does not overwhelm that demand. So it's got the cycl cyclical nature here between the locking, spending, and burning of filecoin. Filecoin clearly demonstrates the first step that they're able to provide the data storage. The remaining steps are still kind of developing and a big part of

what we're digging into. So what is Filecoin? Well, to say it plainly, Filecoin is a decentralized storage marketplace built around independent storage providers. So, just to be clear, of course, Filecoin itself is not the one actually providing the storage, right? It is like a middleman. It's very similar to what we saw with render. Render connects people who who provide rendering service, right? through computation and stuff like that for people who need it. I don't know, a filmmaker, people who do a lot of video game making stuff like that, right? Well, Filecoin is like that middleman like Render is, but for decentralized storage, clients arrange storage deals. Providers commit the capacity, seal the data, and submit proof that the data actually remains storage in storage, right? And Filecoin token coordinates those payments. uh providers collateral, rewards, transaction fees and penalties.

So this is all the utility uses here for filecoin the coin. What problem it solves is pretty simple. Traditional cloud storage depends on centralized companies. So we were going over AWS cloud, Google cloud, Alibaba cloud, stuff like that are where a lot of storage is of course stored and there's even some other places, right? Not all of them are clouds necessarily. They have to maintain the data, set prices, control access, and report whether contractual obligations are actually being fulfilled. Filecoin attempts to make storage open to competing providers, right? So, you can get in that marketplace, put a bid for storing some data. Maybe you have a warehouse somewhere and you could get in on that where normally you'd probably never be big enough to really actually get in on that. Cryptographically verifiable meaning you can like it's saying here

traditionally you'd have to have these reports on whether the contractual obligation was actually being done leaving the customer a little bit less sure of rather if that stuff is really stored when they call for it and need it. Well, Filecoin has made that simpler because they have cryptographic verifiability on that blockchain. Another, you know, gold star for blockchain technology and another way to show how it beats centralized things in a lot of ways. It's censorship resistant, portable across providers, and programmable through smart contracts. What's going on here in the chat? Wait, can these files ever be deleted with Filecoin? That's a good question. Actually, I don't know. Oh, the files are not actually on chain. Yep, the file coins are controlled access through private storage companies. That's what it seems like to me is that you have providers like

say I had, I don't know, a bunch of ability to store data, whatever that looks like for me. And then I go to this marketplace and I look for people and Filecoin is that marketplace, right? And I look for people who need that service. We make a deal for me to store their data and then I store their data and I prove that I actually am storing their data and that they're not paying me for nothing through the blockchain. So what is on the blockchain? Well, what's on the blockchain is proof that I'm storing their data, not actually all their data, right? So, I guess if you had something, it actually brings up a question. It's a good one, uh, CCP, is that it what if you had data that was like sensitive and you didn't want it to

live on a blockchain? I guess this might not be a bad way to do it because people would not necessarily see the actual data. That's my understanding so far. Like I said, I'm learning with you guys. He uh says, "So if one private company goes down, the file is gone." I guess at the end of the day that would be per between you and the data provider which is hey maybe you're finding a risk here that we'll be talking about later because we do have a whole risk section if there is a fire on server farm the file is still gone to the best of my knowledge unless maybe because there's different private providers so maybe you actually decided that you wanted to pay more as a customer and go with a data provider who does something else like

puts it on a blockchain or something like that, you could protect yourself, but that's really, I think, between you and whoever's providing the data and whatever they do, where they are. There's a lot of variables there for sure. And I'm sure we'll get into that in our our section where we talk about risk and unanswered questions. That's actually the last category of of scoring here. So, archival storage. So, proof of replication and proof of spaceime support durable longterm storage. This is interesting. These are terms you've probably never really heard. You've heard of proof of work, proof of stake. Hey, the other day with Bit Tensor, you even heard of proof of authority. Now, we're talking about proof of replica replication and proof of spaceime. Of course, proof is on the blockchain, right? Hot and warm storage, right? Proof of

data possession allows a provider. So, we got right into what you were just talking about. Welltimed. Welltimed. So, proof of data possession allows a provider to demonstrate that immediately accessible data is available without sealing and unsealing it first. This expands Filecoin beyond cold archive type uh DAPs or AI data sets or application frontends and frequently retrieved information. So, it does seem like you can actually access this information relatively easily. Filecoin virtual machine, the FVM, which I have admittedly never really heard of, but it makes perfect sense, enables smart contracts and programmable economic activity around storage, collateral, payments, and [music] provider financing. Filecoin onchain cloud. So the onchain cloud packages storage right retrieval retrieves and proofs. Okay. So the onchain cloud packages storage retrieval proofs and payments into services that developers can integrate into applications. So it does look like

Filecoin itself does a little bit more than just uh connect you with a third party. It looks like they do have some products here like the FVM file virtual machine. Most people most people would know the Ethereum virtual machine because it's integrated in everything. The FVM, it's the same idea, but it's their own version of that. And they do have an onchain cloud as well. So maybe the data does wind up onchain. We have a ton of stuff to get into. So I'm sure we'll answer a lot of these questions. So product and adoption. So what is the product, right? And how well are people adopting it? That's all we want to know. So, we start off with some numbers here. So, this was uh the synchronized September 15th starboard snapshot reported. All right. I don't know what the

starboard snapshot report is or reported. I'm not sure what that is, but anyways, it's some kind of data uh capturing company or something like that. Approximately 1.4 EIB of raw network capacity. Now, I'm not really familiar with that metric of measurement, honestly, but it is a it's a metric of measurement, right? And approximately 602.4 PIB stored in active deals. Roughly 42% utilization after converting the units and approximately 96 million file tokens under Filecoins protocol circulating supply definition. So I guess we can say our circulating supply is 96. That was September 15th. So it might have changed a little bit. Here it's saying circulating supply 830. So that's very close or very similar. And apparently there's a lot of coins being burned all the time. So that's got to be kept in mind. Between the 15th and today, the 23rd,

there might have been quite a bit of file coin burned. So the utilization calculator is an approximate is approximation, right? It's an estimate. More importantly, active deal measure commit storage, not necessarily full price commercial demand. So here's Filecoin capacity versus active deals. You have raw storage capacity, which is this like 1.4 for EIB, which I'm assuming is a large amount of capacity, but what they actually have in active deals is only 62 PIB, which must be a smaller unit measurement, right? Kind of like megabytes and gigabytes and terabytes, right? So that leaves it with about 42% utilization. So usage is real and paid demand is the unanswered question. So at least you can say that about almost half of the raw storage capabilities is actually being used, which is good. I don't think you'd want it to be like

99% because then it would have a storage capacity problem. Genuine adoption evidence. So, what is the evidence that it's genuinely being adopted? Well, Filecoin has been used for data connected with organizations and projects including Internet Archive, Smithonian related collections. Hey, I wonder what kind of information they got in there. MIT Open Learning, Starling Lab, Scientific Research Data Sets, Blockchain History Archives, AI Deepen, and Web3 Infrastructure. So, it's already actively being used by some of these, and you can tout a couple of customers people might know like the Smithsonian or MIT. In 2025, Filecoin introduced specialized access layer including AAVA AV. Uh, I'm going to probably butcher most of these. Sorracha, uh, Rammo, and Lighthouse. Ethereum virtual machine contracts calls reportedly reached about 4.1 million during 2025. So, it does have Ethereum virtual machine integration. [music] Nearly tripling year-over-year. Nearly

tripling year-over-year is a good metric to point out about Filecoin. Sounds like they have something that people really are using and that's only going to grow, right? If you think about actual demand for data storage right now, it's only going to grow. I don't see any world where we're going to have less internet, less applications, less anything. Even in the world of decentralization, what is its adoption limitations? Well, Filecoin's strongest usage metric combines several types of activities. paid storage, subsidized verified storage, public data sets, ecosystem supported onboarding, and provider reward optimization. Uh, let's see, the pedibyte storage, I don't know what that is, stored. So, a pedibyte stored, that must be what the PIB stands for through an incentive supported program is technically real data. [music] It is not automatically evidence that a customer paid a commercially sustainable price

though. Product to token value map. So from the product, all that storage, all that marketplace to a token that receives value or captures value, hence the word token value capture of that ecosystem and the money that flows through it. Uh probably one of the most important things if you hold the coin that you could possibly know. Data onchain would mean every single node will have a copy of the data question mark. That is a good question. I hope we get into that. I'm not sure. Like I said, I am learning with you guys, especially tonight as I don't have all the ins and outs. Like there's so many, you know, how many people out there listening to this are already specialized in data storage, the the metrics that that you measure it in, like just all the different things.

I certainly am not highly specialized in data storage. Um, and there's been a lot of techy stuff. Bit Tensor was an intense token autopsy, but I'm glad I did it. I learned so much and I'm already learning a ton about Filecoin. Uh, the compounding nature of learning uh, these token autopsies every night has just really really expounded my crypto IQ and I hope it has for you as well. So, Filecoin token can be used to pay providers giving it utility. However, Filecoin Pay is a token agnostic and not a and not supported stable coin payment flows. Let me read that again. However, Filecoin Pay is token agnostic, right, specific and supports stablecoin payment flows that improve customer experience. But it means growing storage revenue does not automatically create an equal spot market demand for file token. So filecoin pay

is how you pay for the services and it's not um apparently only paid in filecoin. That's what I'm getting from this right. It supports stablecoin payment flows. So you can pay in stable coin meaning it does not every single customer isn't creating demand for the filecoin token. So provider collateral providers must pledge file the token when committing storage that is one of files strongest native demand mechanisms. So more secured capacity can require more collateral. Filecoin the token becomes locked rather than immediately circulating which is a positive and providers fail failure right so if a provider failure can result in penalties or as we said earlier slashing you see slashing a lot with validators and stuff like that because in order to be a validator in most networks you have to commit you have to buy a certain amount of

the native asset and you have to commit it so if you mess up you you you try to I don't know rig the system a little bit and make a little extra money and they find out that just take a huge chunk of money right off the table and uh basically you'll pay for it one way or another. Gas and protocol activity. Well, Filecoin pays network gas. A portion of network fees and provider penalty is burned. So, there is a burning mechanism. I would like to know more about that burning mechanism block reward. So, providers receive newly minted file tokens for securing and operating the network storage. This creates a supply and subsidy infrastructure, which is great when you're first starting out, but as you go on many, many, many years can begin to become a problem. And uh

I'd like to see what their answer is for that. Reli Reliable Jay says he's got a bag full of Sia coin, SI Acoin, uh the OG data storage. Okay, that's really interesting. Um, I've heard of that token, but it's been a long time since I've heard anybody mention that token. Let's talk about Filecoin smart contract activity, right? So, FBM, Filecoin virtual machine applications actually use File token for gas and create financing, lending, collateral, and payment systems around storage providers. Buffink, it's good to see that name in the chat. Thanks for being here. Says, "Can you see how much storage capacity they have added this year? If they have 45% filled and they aren't adding more storage, could that mean they don't expect any growth?" So, I can try to get those numbers for you for sure at the towards

the end of the stream. I don't want to derail where we are, but maybe you could hold that thought, maybe even remind me. I definitely understand what you're saying for sure. And I I kind of thought the same thing a little bit when I saw that they have [clears throat] 45% of capacity filled. I guess the question is how fast are they growing and do they see themselves needing to upgrade capacity anytime soon? and also how hard is it for them to upgrade capacity, right? Those are the questions that would need to be laid out. So, Filecoin has genuine protocol utility, the token, and I would love to get to your questions, Buff Link, for sure. So, hold on, hold that thought for me, as they would say. Struggle heart, thank you for letting me know you're still here.

I appreciate you big time. Yeah, no hurry, just thinking out loud. Hey, man, this is the place for it. I appreciate you being a part of this token autopsy. I can't wait as this channel continues to grow and we are growing um for more people to genuinely enter these conversations in the middle of the token autopsy. I think it's going to be really cool. So, I appreciate you helping us move towards that reality. All right. So, Filecoin token has genuine protocol utility. The unresolved issue here is whether paid customer activity creates enough file demand, locking, and burning to outweigh emissions and incentive related selling. We talk about this all the time when it comes to burning or a coin supply, token supply becoming deflationary or inflationary or in the middle. There can be an in the middle, but usually

you wind up on one side of that coin. [music] So you have payments right storage and service deals well file token agnostic rail right so that goes into the file value loop then you have locking right providers pledge collateral so if you're a data storage provider you have to buy buy file tone file coin I was going to say file token and coin and I put it together into one word all right so you have to buy the coin file and then you have to lock it up. And then you have a burning mechanism, gas fees and penalties. So gas fees, which is normal for any network. And then of course penalties that may occur to anybody who's done anything wrong or against the smart contract that's put in place. Well, those all get burned, but we don't have

the actual numbers yet. Hopefully they're in this. Buffling says, "I hit the like button. Have you?" Hey, that that's a valid question. Um, well, hopefully we get some more numbers here when it comes to emissions. Sometimes those numbers can be hard to track down. Uh, because they can be based off of several different things. How many tokens are actually issued can be directly related to different metrics inside an ecosystem. And so it's not a flat rate like some projects just put out a certain amount of tokens every quarter, every month, every block, no matter what. Others have different mechanisms to govern how many tokens come out. So revenue reality check, right? What we can actually measure is that stored data in activity deals, right? In active deals, we can measure that. We were talking about that earlier. network capacity,

onchain gas fee, file token locked as provider collateral, and file token that has been burned through fees and penalties. We can see block rewards distributed to the providers. These are things that we can see and measure and know. What we can't really know or treat as revenue raw storage capacity. So that 42% well that other what 48% that's left well we can't count that as revenue because it's just the potential of storage capacity that could become revenue but it hasn't yet and we don't know when it will. Quality adjusted power. We can't treat data cap allocations as revenue or block rewards. token trading volume or the dollar value of file token locked as collateral. And of course, we have some metrics for you here. 3.16 million in filecoin defi uh defy total value locked. $2,000 in 24hour chain fees.

That doesn't seem like a big enough number, but okay. 10,49 active addresses means nothing because actual bots can be you know thousands of those 60 60,900 let's call it 61,000 transactions over the last 24 hours that's pretty nice though that's a that's a bit of a robust ecosystem but again bots can make up a large part of those transaction so these figures show blockchain activity but they do not equally or equal network storage revenue I don't I don't know why it is hot in this room today in my office. It's kind of throwing me off. So, what are our missing numbers? So, there is no single audited public networkwide figure in the reviewed sources that cleanly answer how much reoccurring revenue did independent customers pay Filecoin storage and retrieval providers. That would be really good to have. That missing

number is central to this investment case. [music] Sounds like maybe we need more audits here for Filecoin. Tokconomics and valuation. Well, current market snapshot here. Of course, it's about 93 to 94. Circulating supply is approximately 831 million file token as of today. Market capitalization 575 to 780 million. For most people, market cap, you know, is highly important when you're doing tokconomics. Protocol maximum two billion file, which is interesting because I don't see this anywhere else, a protocol maximum, but it seems like maybe there's some differentiation, [music] you know, in what is the protocols maximum and what is being reported as the maximum that you could have out in the future. cuz it does say that it's infinite, but this says 2 billion. So, somebody's got something messed up or I'm not understanding something about the way Filecoin is set

up. Remember, we're deep diving and learning together. And to me, that's what makes this fun. So, original allocation, right, from token generation event, from the Genesis, from when this project came out, 70% went to mining rewards, which is how this the whole system runs. 15% protocol lab, 10% fundraising and related ecosystem allocation and 5% to the filecoin foundation. So actually very small amount 5%. Within the mining allocation 55% of the mining allocation which was 70% uh of that maximum supply is storage mining rewards and 15% for mining reserve. The storage mining reward pool therefore has a uh a simpic allocation of 1.1 billion file coin. That is interesting. So emission design this is what I wanted to get into and of course it would be within this the tokconomics right token section here. So the storage mining allocation 30%

simple minting and 70% baseline minting. Baseline minting attempts to connect issuance with network growth rather than releasing all rewards strictly according to time. So they're trying to tie it to value created versus just every day or every other day or every 30 days, right? because who knows what was actually done in that time and they don't want to give away more than the actual value that's being created. So provider reward vesting under FIP00004 which must be a proposal that had passed right at some point. 25% it must be a very early proposal cuz it's like the fourth proposal. Anyways that's that's a DAO thing. I won't get into that. 25% of storage mining rewards uh becomes immediately available and 75% vests across 180 days. So 25% of storage mining reward rewards become immediately available. So you have you have

the 100 you have the whole pie of what you earned. 25% of it you can use immediately as a provider on the Filecoin network. And 75% of it comes out across 180 days, hopefully trying to limit people just selling all the tokens as soon as they get them. Uh that's a good mechanism to have in here. So that supports provider liquidity while maintaining long-term alignment. So, Filecoin's official 2026 strategy states that the final network vesting periods will end later in 2026. Uh, I think that's bullish because mainnet launches in October 2020 and protocol lab foundation/lab uh foundation allocations right uses or used a six-year schedule. The final scheduled Genesis vesting that vesting is coins coming out reaches its conclusion around October 2026. Uh that's very soon. That is a schedulebased inference, not a claim that one enormous cliff unlock

on one single day. And a cliff unlock [snorts] is just a ton of tokens being unlocked at a very specific one time, right? We don't know exactly how they're going to be unlocked, but it seems that it's going to conclude around October 2026, which is very soon, which could get rid of some of the inflationary things against file token that would help it improve in value. So, hard protocol maximum is positive. Even though a lot of places don't report that, I'm actually very surprised by this because going back again to Coin Gecko, it shows max supply is infinite. It's very interesting. I was just reading their explanation for maximum supply. All right, so permanent burns here are positive. Collateral locking very positive. utility inside the storage protocol for the file token itself. That is very positive. And of course,

the final Genesis vesting nearing completion and only over 6 years. That's pretty uh short for a lot of these projects. What is negative though? [music] Well, continuing mining issuance that is going to bring more tokens in large difference between current circulation and the protocol maximum provider rewards remain economically important. Paid service value does not automatically flow through file token because apparently they made it easier for customers to use something like a stable coin which I'm not a fan of. if you actually like the file token and hold it and customer demand economics remain difficult to isolate themselves. That rolls us right into the next category here for filecoin competitive moat. Now moat is just its ability to fend off its competitors or win against its competitors. I realize that language can be confusing but it's technically the right term

so I don't want to change it. Filecoin strongest advantages scale. Filecoin remains the largest decentralized storage network by raw capacity. Uh verifiable storage its core different orientations, right? I don't know why I can't talk tonight. This is crazy. Is not merely inexpensive disc space, right? That's not exactly what they're selling you. It is the ability to prove that contracted data remains stored. Not just that it was stored at one point, but that it remains stored and having access to it when you need it. IPFS relationship. Filecoin benefits from a broader IPFS ecosystem and content address data model. Specialize cryptonnomics, right? Or cryptoeconomics, collateral proofs, penalties, and rewards are built specifically for storage. Aka, we're really just saying here that Filecoin is a very niched specific product or company or provider. Um, and we don't know that they're going to

get into anything else anytime soon, which is good. It has its pluses and it has its negative pros and cons. So, provider and tooling ecosystem. So, Filecoin has years of infrastructure, provider knowledge, proof system, developer tooling, and data onboarding experience. Again, we're talking about its mo or its ability to stack up against its competitors. It's got a lot of time in what it's been doing here and all the the time that it's put into making it possible for developers to build here. Why would you go somewhere else when they don't have near as much time put into this expanding product surface, right? So we have this PDP filecoin onchain cloud the filecoin virtual machine stablecoin payments hot storage and s3 compatible access layer widen the addressable marketplace so it's got more than a one-sided thing right it doesn't just

have the filecoin virtual machine or it doesn't just have a filecoin onchain cloud also has other things competitive pressure though traditional cloud providers obviously still do compete and how many people really will only like a customer how many of these customers will only settle for decentralized storage. I could see maybe some people who have been building inside the the decentralized or cryptographic or blockchain landscape and maybe believe heavily in the ethos of decentralization or you have a reason inside your specific business that you run that really needs for whatever reason decentralized storage. Other than that you got AWS, Microsoft Azour. That was what I was trying to remember earlier. Google Cloud and it's funny they don't even mention Alibaba cloud, but just know that that is out there. Familiar developer tooling, right? Mature customer support been around a long

time. Strong service level agreements, probably some compliance stuff in there. Integrated computation and database sets and straightforward billing. Filecoin cannot win only by being cheaper. So, it's saying some customers are going to value things like uh strong service level, right? Or mature customer support. How good, you know, Google Cloud's customer support is, I don't actually know. Or AWS. But is it probably better than Filecoin's customer support? Maybe, maybe not. Arweave. So, Arweave emphasizes permanent storage funded through an upfront payment model. Arweave is a competitor. You have storage and of course sigh which is what uh reliable J had brought up just a little while ago. These compete for decentralized storage customers with different architecture and user experience. I don't know a lot about storage or SAIA as far as how they actually run. I've definitely heard of them. I

know what they are and I knew that they were competitors but I don't really know how they stack up, how big they are and then like we were talking about some of those capacity metrics. Don't know anything about these two right here. IPFS without file. So some applications can use IPFS pinning and centralized pinning services without actually requiring Filecoin's complete ecosystem economic system there. Right. Filecoin has a meaningful technical moat in verifiable decentralized storage. A very key emphasis on [music] decentralized storage and not just storage data storage in general. [music] If you take away the decentralized part of it, they have a lot of competitors and are much lower on the totem pole. So, its commercial moat is less established because mainstream customers usually prioritize reliability, support, retrieval speed, integration, and predictable billing before decentralization. It's kind of the

point I've been trying to make all along here is that uh decentralization is not a lot of companies number one thing that they're looking for. It would be things like support retrieving the data quickly and integrating uh and of course predictable billing. Who doesn't want predictable billing? security and decentralization, right? Security strength. Well, you do have proof of replication and proof of space time, which is something that's actually a little bit different than your uh centralized versions, right? AWS, Google Cloud, stuff like that. They have to do like an audit or a report and give that report to you that you actually are getting what you paid for. Filecoin removes a little bit of that headache by having it having proof on blockchain, right? Provider collateral slashing in penalties, right? Which is a product of decentralization and and uh

getting people to do what they're supposed to do by giving them a financial negative financial incentive if they do something they're not supposed to do. publicly audible storage commitments, open- source protocol, fast finality improvements, and multiple independent providers. So, con uh concentration, concentration is what I need right now. That's what I need. Uh because I don't know what's going on with my ability to talk. It's not like I talk on the internet for 3, four hours almost every single day. Uh, Reliable J says Saiia SI A been going up since news of the BTC fork to run on Blake 2B. Okay. Uh, admittedly, I don't know a ton about that actually. I would have to check that out. Okay. So, concentration reality, an independent September 21st onchain analysis duplicated 499 reported minor IDs into about approximately 204 operators. It

estimates the top operators controlled approximately 12% of raw power. Eight operators controlled approximately 50% and six operators controlled approximately 90%. This is not an official Filecoin metric though, but it is useful independent warning that minor ID count can overstate oper uh operator decentralization or just giving you the false belief of more decentralization that is what is actually there. Hardware barrier. So operating a competitive provider requires significant storage hardware obviously because you have to at the end of the day you can do all this digital decentralized stuff but there has to be somewhere where you're actually physically storing this data to make it all work high bandwidth right technical expertise file collateral they have to have a large amount of filecoin I don't know what the exact number is uh reliable operations and long-term capital the network is permissionless at

the protocol level, but the practical barrier to competitive participation is substantial, right? You can't just provide data from your laptop computer at home. Uh you have to actually have the ability to do that hardware-wise. Security conclusions, right? Filecoin is materially more decentralized than a single cloud provider and has strong cryptographic accountability. However, power concentration and capital requirements prevent a maximum decentralized score. So, it's slacking a little bit on that decentralization. Solstice, the economic reset. Why Solstice even exists? Filecoin Plus attempted to reward useful verified data. So they were trying to line up the incentive and the rewards of newly emitted or minted filecoin to people who were doing something more useful versus just anybody who was considered a provider. Over time, the data cap process introduced things like administrative overhead, slow approvals, opportunities for gaming, and an imperfect connection

between verified data and paying demand. What the FIP0118 challenges, Solstice would in new file plus data cap issuance. Remove the verified versus unverified reward distinction for new sectors. Continue paying providers for consensus and storage. Redirect part of the block reward towards service orchestrators. Measure orchestrator rewards using verified filecoin pay activity. Increase service rewards as paid volume reaches defined threshold. The proposal has been accepted but the economic result must be evaluated after deployment and it doesn't look like uh we have deployment anytime soon. Struggart says, "Yeah, I'm listening." Awesome. But it's been a lot of information to go over tonight. Absolutely. And trying to keep it all straight has been a lot of fun. So, why it matters? I thought after we did the Bit Tinser token autopsy, I was ready for anything. But this one's actually giving me a

little bit of a run for my money. I don't know what that is. Uh why it matters, right? Well, Solstice acknowledges that Filecoin or Filecoins old reward system was better at measuring approved data than measuring customers willingness to pay. And that makes Solstice both a meaningful catalyst and evidence that a previous economic model requires repair. Catalyst and execution, right? That brings us right into catalyst and execution, right? Filecoin onchain cloud is a unverified service layer for a unified. Why did I say unverified? That's what I'm saying. I keep making small like [music] reading mistakes. I'm like, man, I can tell I'm tired today. Hey, some days we're exhausted. You stream every day. Raise your crypto IQ every day. H I think I think I'm afforded an off day like like maybe two, three times a year. Can we all

agree on that? Hit hit the like button if you agree I can have an off day every once in a while even though it hasn't been that bad. Anyways, enough of that. [music] So, a unified service layer for storage. Filecoin has that retrieval, programmable payments, proof of verification, and developer integration. Proof of data possession, which is what PDP stands for, expands Filecoin towards immediately accessible hot storage. I mean, if you just know cold storage, hot storage, you would understand the point. Uh, hot storage always connected to the internet so you can retrieve it and use it in real time. If you're somebody who wants data storage, you probably want it to be accessible in real time. AI data demand. AI creates demand for training data, right? Model checkpoints, data province, audit logs, agent memory, and verifiable data assets, which

was kind of something I was getting at at the very beginning of the stream, is that some of the best use cases for decentralized storage is probably going to come from agentic networks, AI agents, right? And things that already exist inside the world of decentralization. Um, of course other AI things can can create demand for storage as well, but what is going to win out against its competitors who have a long history of centralized storage capability. So, Filecoin must convert that narrative into named paying customers and reoccurring revenue in order to be on the up and up here. Solstice upgrade. So the proposed reward redesign could align incentives more closely with paid activity. That's the point of it. And the end of the final Genesis vesting is also a catalyst for Filecoin. So the conclusion of six-year contributor and

foundation schedules, right, of coins removes one of the continuing sources of scheduled vesting, aka new tokens coming out into the circulating supply. Mining emissions still continue, right? So just because they're done contributing or giving to the foundation and things like that doesn't mean that mining emissions for people who are keeping the network up and running is going away. So Filecoin's own 2026 grant program is funding possible mechanisms that connect stable coin storage payments to file token locking and burning. It's promising, [music] but it also confirms that complete paid service value does not yet exist automatically. And of course, then being able to pay and something other than Filecoin also a problem. Risks and unanswered questions. Well, paid demand transparency. Can the ecosystem publish a consistent audible number for reoccurring customer revenue? So far, doesn't look like it. Subsidy dependency.

How much current storage would remain if enhanced rewards disappeared? Highly important, right? Cuz they will at some point disappear because they can't pay for it forever. Provider profitability. Can providers cover the hardware, power, bandwidth, staffing, collateral, and data transfer expenses using customer revenue? The revenue has to be substantial enough to cover all that the provider has to pay in order to be here, right? Collateral is a probably a big one, right? How much Filecoin they have to hold because that's just something they have to buy and hold. They can't really do anything with it. Retrieval experience. Cam Filecoin provide the speed, reliability, and service guarantees required for product applications. So, if you have an app and you decide to use Filecoin and it's slow, then you're going to somebody else. You're going to AWS, you're going to Google Cloud,

right? That would be a real problem for Filecoin. So, they have to demonstrate that they can really hold up for people who develop and use applications and decide to store their information with Filecoin. Capacity contraction, right? An independent September snapshot showed approximately 1.3 EIB of raw storage compared with historical peaks near 16.7 EIB. Some contraction removes unused or uneconomic capacity which can improve utilization. However, prolong provider departure can also reduce resilience and geographic diversity. I was hoping we were going to get to some of those numbers that Bufflink was asking about. Operator concentration. Does economic pressure continue uh consolidating storage power among large providers? Right? This is what you see in a lot of these big markets is uh the concentration of storage right power with larger and larger providers becoming basically a monopoly inside a system file token

value capture right will stable coin payments increase customer adoption without bypassing filecoin token we're talking about questions that are still unanswered right solstice execution right so we have this solstice upgrade which should bring some cool things, but how's it going to go down? If anybody's ever watched any pro uh product or project roll out a new upgrade, it can get messy or it can go off very smooth without a hitch, but you just don't know till you go there. So, will rewards tied to paid volume produce sustainable demand or will or create a new metric that participants learn to game? Right? So, they're changing up the game and how it works to align the rewards that are being created. New minted file coin given as rewards. They want to align that to people who are actually giving more value

to the ecosystem. But will they just learn how to play the same game with different rules? Competition. Can Filecoin compete on customer experience rather than just relying on decentralization as the entire sales pitch, which is the thing I keep saying over and over again? And also they are probably seem to be I haven't seen the actual numbers you have to pay but they seem to be cheaper than some other places like maybe Google cloud or uh you know Microsoft Azor but their main sale pitch of course is decentralization. So let's lay out the strongest bull case for Filecoin. So, if you're still listening and you own Filecoin and a lot of that went over your head, well, you probably need to raise that crypto IQ and join our free Discord down in the chat so you have access to

ask questions when we're not live streaming. Smash that like button. And of course, remember that I uh got rid of our ad revenue for your viewer experience. So, please consider one of those memberships. It's $3 a month to start. Uh I don't think you can get much cheaper than that, right? What am I going to charge? 89. Uh, but that would never create anything substantial. Anyways, there are higher tiers that give you different things, but $3 is where you can start and support all the educational work and time and energy that I put into this channel. Of course, you get some cool custom emojis, too. Anyways, Filecoin, this is the bullcase, right? Strongest bullcase. Filecoin has already built infrastructure that would be extraordinarily difficult to recreate by say its customers. A global provider network. It's got an exabyte scale

storage capacity, which I'm going to admit I don't really understand exactly where that fits in with terabytes and all that stuff, but it's a lot. Proven cryptographic storage verification. They got that. Substantial real data sets. They got that. A programmable smart contract layer. They got that hot storage technology. That's awesome because that really is what going to make them a lot more useful to AI and applications and stuff. They have emerging onchain cloud platform and native collateral and penalty mechanisms to to penalize people if they do anything wrong which incentivizes monetarily good behavior. So if AI, blockchain archives, public data sets, compliance, and data province create substained demand for verifiable storage, then Filecoin could become a foundational data layer. In the in that scenario though, Filecoin benefits from collateral requirements, gas usage, burns, provider economics, and possible future value

acrruel mechanisms, right? increasing in value if you're not sure what that word means. Somebody's like, "What does that even mean?" All right, reliable Jay coming in with those metrics. I appreciate you doing that. So, raw capacity pledged hard drives. PIB active storage data empty space left is about 306 PIB. 1.95 EIB is equivalent to roughly 2.24 billion gigabytes. Wow. But how many is it in terabytes? No, I appreciate you giving me that information. Reliable Jay, I hope that that uh I hope that answers Buff Link's question. I'll readress that. So, we just laid out like what is the best bullish case. We got to lay out the be the strongest bearish case, right? Filecoins large historical storage number were partly built through token incentives and enhanced rewards rather than durable customer revenue. The network now has significantly less raw

capacity than at its historical peak. Provider participation has concentrated and commercial revenue remains difficult to isolate and current onchain fees are small. That's problematic. Stable coin payments may improve the product while weakening direct file payment demand. Solstice and proposed burn and lock mechanisms are attempting to repair the connection between customer and success of the Filecoin value. Under this interpretation, Filecoin built impressive infrastructure before proving that enough customers were willing to pay for it. The counterargument here, it's unfair to expect a decentralized infrastructure network to compete immediately with cloud companies that have spent decades building distribution, support, and integrated services and have a ton of money. Early token rewards help finance a global storage network before sufficient demand actually existed. Infrastructure often must be built before customers can use it. basically believing in the process here cuz remember we see

the same thing with Bit Tensor that we went over last night. Wink wink. There's a reason why these are all together. So Filecoin is now deliberately moving from capacity creation towards paid demand. this PDP onchain cloud and stablecoin payments enterprise access layers and solstice directly addressed [music] uh earlier weaknesses and are changing things. It's been passed but it hasn't actually been implemented yet. Oh, he clapped back with the one PIB is equal to 1,125 terabytes. Okay, that makes more sense to me. I don't know why having it in terabytes actually allows me to uh visualize that those uh amounts of data. What's the right way to say that to visualize uh the storage capacity? That's what I'm looking for. So the question is no longer whether Filecoin understands its problem. Right? The question is whether can it execute the

transition fast enough. So, with this whole Solstice upgrade, uh, we know that Falcoin is aware of the problem and is is looking to fix it. Can it do it quickly and do it well? All right, so let's go over the numbers and then let's talk about Filecoin's score. So, for utility and adoption, it actually gets a 16 out of 20, which is only four points short, right? Filecoin provides a clear necessary product, decentralized storage backed by cryptographic proofs. So, it does that. So, as far as uh utility and adoption, it gets a pretty good score. Token value capture, it gets a 15 out of 20. Obviously, there's five points missing. Filecoin has several genuine protocol functions for the token itself, right? The Filecoin token and those are like storage providers, pledge file as collateral, network gas, utility, uh Filecoin

virtual machine. There are some good stuff there. Tokconomics and supply though get a eight out of 15. Biocoin has a maximum protocol supply of about 2 billion filed tokens. And uh I'm taking the word of the their own documents on their own website here, right? And the full amount can never circulate because network fees and penalties permanently burn tokens. So that's a plus. Although a lot of different places will report a infinite max supply and I don't know why that is competitive mode. Can it beat its customers or competitors? I [laughter] hope it doesn't beat its customers. Oh man. All right. So, uh, can it beat out its competitors? I don't know. When you have competitors like AWS and Google Cloud, those are some real competitors. That's kind of crazy. Uh, Filecoin has substantial tech mo in the decentralized

areas, but of course it still didn't get a perfect score. Security and decentralization. Well, we talked a lot about the decentralization aspect. Filecoin combines cryptographic storage proofs provider collateral slashing public commitments and open source software and independent storage provider. These mechanisms can make providers economically accountable and reduce dependency on any single cloud company. So that's why I got a seven out of 10. And of course, catalyst and execution, eight out of 10. Filecoin has several credible catalysts, right? Filecoin onchain cloud, proof of data possession, hot and warm storage services. All of this information will be posted [music] in the Discord at a later date. risk imbalance though or unanswered questions. Five out of 10. And it's so funny, almost every project gets about a five out of 10. Filecoin faces materially unresolved risks. Commercial storage revenue is difficult to

isolate and know about. We need more audit auditing for Filecoin. I don't know what they're waiting for, but [music] um it would give a lot of people and investors and speculators a lot more uh confidence in them if they would just go ahead and and have constant audibility inside their revenue streams. Maybe there's a reason why they don't want you to. So again, very very very hard to get an 80% or higher score. So this winds up with a 71 on the watch list. And Filecoin has a real product. A significant technical moat. This is the final verdict, right? A real product. Significant technical moat, especially in decentralized data uh data storage and one of the strongest examples of necessary token utility and decentralized infrastructure. However, the network has not yet demonstrated that reoccurring paid demand can support providers

and create enough filecoin value capture to replace subsidy dependent growth. Filecoin belongs on the watch list while paid storage volume provider revenue, filecoin token locking and filecoin token burning and solstice upgrade executions develop. Got a nice little graphic here. So, it's a 71 out of 100. And of course, I just read you the final verdict. How's everybody doing out there tonight? And uh Buff Buff Link, you still with us? Did Reliable Jay answer your question here? Let's see if he did. So, can you see how much storage capacity they have added this year? I don't think so. I don't think that we're going to be Some of the numbers seem very difficult to get like for example, how much revenue they're getting. uh that is actual like commercial customers and not subsidy like they're basically paying for it so

that people will use it. Uh that's that's a different story, right? So I don't think I'm going to be able to get those numbers. If they have 45% filled and they aren't adding more storage, could that mean they don't expect any growth? Well, Buffink, they never necessarily said that they weren't going to add more storage. It just seems like they're way under 50% capacity. Again, I think the question is how hard is it for them to add more storage? Is that an easy, very fast thing for them to do? Cuz if it is easy and fast for them to do, well, then they're definitely going to do that. It also does seem like because they're not the ones with the hardware providing the storage that it's kind of an incentivized game, right? So like more people come into Filecoin

and they need more storage is probably or should tokconomically or economically mean that the rewards for being a provider go up. There's more money to be made. So more people come in and become a data storage provider and therefore you have more capacity. At one point it says they had like 16.1 EIB I believe which is crazy cuz right now they have like what two EIB. Of course that's measuring in EIB and not PIB. Yeah. So 1.95 EIB is roughly uh 2.2 billion gigabytes and one PIB is equal to 1,125 terabytes. Struggart says tired out today. I feel you. Reliable J says no. Filecoin has not significantly expanded its overall maximum capacity in 2026. scaling demand more than supply. Hey, and you want to get that. You could put all of the storage capability, but if you don't ever

increase the demand, it doesn't matter too much. So, I wouldn't say that it's a bad call. We're just going to need to see for Filecoin how these two different catalysts for it play out. the execution of that solstice upgrade and then on top of that the ending of vesting for the foundation and the lab and stuff like that and whatever early investors and stuff should help with some of the dilution. So, who knows? Filecoin at this price point might not be a bad buy. Maybe because it's not financial advice. Just thinking out loud here for myself. But I bought it a while ago and I probably bought it at two $2 $3 something like that. Let's look at that max. The max chart is ugly, but a lot of coins are. I definitely didn't pay no $50, $60 per

coin. Definitely did not. >> Maybe three or four at one point, but I think I bought mine mostly around like $2. which means I must have bought it. Yeah, back in here. >> No, I didn't buy it in 2025. I've held it a long time. So, yeah, I probably did buy it more at like the low $3. So, it's got some it's got some money to make up here for me to be above water. And again, it was just a few hundred bucks. It wasn't a big deal, but can it get attention in this market? And how crazy are we going to go? Are we looking at super cycles? Are we looking at kind of a regular bull run? How much money is going to flow into this market? Are we getting adoption this cycle? These are all questions

that have to be answered. Now, I have been far more active on Twitter, so I'd really appreciate if you would follow me, and that is cryptoron with the blue check mark, right? And uh oh, that's ground crypto, right? I don't know what most people type in. When I look for somebody or when I find my own page, like if I'm trying to sell tell somebody about like my Twitter out on the street in real life in public in IRL, um I usually tell them to type in crypto Ron and it comes up real easy. You want to look for this blue check mark and verified. We are small on Twitter. We're growing. The suppression of crypto related content and stuff on all the platforms has been very real, like very very real. And I know people with big accounts

[music] um who who've been feeling it for sure. Anyways, definitely follow me. We're starting to get a lot more traction over here. I'm posting about a lot more. Like here's Neutron proposal number nine wasn't a smart contract bug. It was a governance math problem. So we're we're posting about all kinds of things. Celestia's blob economic proposal. Ask one question that matters for TIA. A dao. So a is essential Athena USDE for Avalanch's V4. Putting it together a lot of the things that we've gone over. We've done a token autopsy on a we've done one on Athena and we've done one on Avalanche and we even talked about USDE and the volume 4 and Avalanche. This is like a a good one for me because they all really kind of [music] came together there. Anyways, just want to encourage you

to come over here. It's another place where you can message and chat with me if for some reason you don't want to join our free Discord down in the chat. With that, guys, I'm going to go ahead and hop off. It's been an extremely long day. For anybody who doesn't know, uh, my son should be born literally any day now. And I will keep you guys updated as far as if I'm going to be doing a live stream or not. Depending on the time, I may not miss a stream, right? I may not miss any stream, but we will see how that goes, right? Because I can't control uh I can't control it, right? You can paint a pretty picnic, but you can't control the weather. Hey, hey, hey. Where's my Outcast fans out there? So, stay underground, stay

crypto, think long term, never financial advice. Catch you in the next one. Join the Discord, come hang out with us, be a part of the community. Do you consider yourself an undergrounder? And if you like that you didn't have to watch a bunch of ads during my show, uh, grab that $3 membership. it'll come in more and more useful to use later down the line with the Discord. All right, guys. I'm out of here. Underground crypto out. I appreciate all of you. Love all my undergrounders. Love all the deep diving researchers out there who continue to believe in blockchain technology, crypto, cryptographic technology, decentralization, the original Bitcoin ethos, code is law. Shout out to you guys. Big pat on the back. Struggle heart says, "Thanks again. Reliable Jay here all the way to the end with the salute. Really

appreciate you guys and uh I'll see you in the next episode which is Let me just double check here. It's Wednesday. Okay, so we got one more before Defi Friday. What will we be doing a token autopsy on next? I should do a thing where if you can guess what we're doing, then there's some kind of reward. That would be cool. Anyways, before I get long- winded here, I'll catch you in the next one tomorrow night, 8:30 p.m. New York time. Underground crypto out.