🚀 Proposal: Simplify costs, improve efficiency
Filecoin's economic model evolves with its growth, balancing efficiency, scalability, and sustainability. In response to community feedback and operational insights, we are excited to introduce FIP-0100, a key proposal that reshapes how Filecoin handles storage onboarding costs while improving network efficiency. This FIP proposes:
• Remove Batch Balancer: Eliminate batch fees for all precommit and provecommit methods.
• Introducing sector-based charges: Replacing Batch Balancer with a stable, predictable mechanism to support long-term economic sustainability.
• Eliminating gas limits: Simplifying protocol operations by removing outdated constraints.
This proposal reflects insights from extensive discussions about better coordinating value accumulation and addressing gas fee thawing.
🔍 Why change? Current challenges
The current batch balancing mechanism aims to stabilize Filecoin's economy but presents significant challenges:
• Inefficient batching and proof aggregation: Provecommit's precommit batching and proof aggregation make economic sense only when base costs are high, creating barriers to efficient gas use.
• Complex cost structure: Batch Balancer relies on fluctuating gas fees, making it difficult for storage providers (SP) to predict costs.
• Outdated constraints: Originally designed before proper gas accounting, current protocol restrictions unnecessarily limit growth.
These inefficiencies misalign incentives and hinder optimizations that could reduce gas costs and improve network performance. Community discussions, including the Idea Pitch at FDS5 in Bangkok 2025: Filecoin value accumulation and long-term issuance meetings, emphasized the need for more effective approaches.
💡 FIP-0100 Solution: Three-step approach
1. Remove Batch Balancer
By eliminating batch fees:
• Precommit batching becomes reasonable: Service providers can batch sectors more frequently without fees, significantly reducing gas usage.
• Proof Aggregation has been optimized: Eliminating aggregation fees enables broader adoption, improving scalability and onboarding speed.
Savings example:
• Precommit batching for 4 sectors reduces the gas per sector from 16.7M to 4.6M (savings of 3.6 times).
• Provecommit aggregation reduces the gas per sector from 267.5M to 129.3M (savings of 2 times).
2. Introducing sector-based charges
Replacing Batch Balancer with sector-based charging ensures predictable and stable costs:
• Daily payments: Fees are paid daily, avoiding large upfront costs that could hinder onboarding.
• Aligning with network growth: The fee adjusts based on circulating supply, supporting economic stability.
• Caps for high-growth scenarios: Payments have caps to prevent excessive costs during rapid network expansion.
3. Eliminate gas limits
No longer required outdated protocol constraints, such as batch size limits. Removing them will:
• Simplifying protocol design: Reducing unnecessary code complexity.
• Enhanced flexibility: Allows network expansion without artificial bottlenecks.
📊 Economic impact: Balancing costs and growth
FIP-0100 fundamentally changes the way Filecoin captures value:
• Decoupling gas fees from service fees: Gas fees include execution costs; sector-based charges reflect the value of storage auditing.
• Predictable costs for SP: Simplified cost modeling makes it easier to plan and act.
• Supporting sustainable growth: Network revenue aligns with storage demand, not just gas usage.
We expect the number of Gas entries to decrease by ~30%, which will reduce base costs and improve storage growth efficiency.
🗘️ Design Principles
Our onboarding fee design prioritizes:
• Simplifying the system to improve predictability
• Introducing industry-based charges should help reduce the likelihood of network shocks caused by unpredictable base cost fluctuations.
• Service providers should be able to infer future fees, rewards, and ROI.
• Simpler systems are easier to maintain and require fewer manual updates.
Capturing network value: Fees will vary with network demand, reflecting the added value of the ecosystem.
Avoiding bottlenecks: The new model will ensure we have higher onboarding capacity within the current system.
🚀 What's the next step? Implementation Path
• Community feedback: Please participate in this proposal on the FIP forum.
• Network upgrades: This FIP requires protocol changes in future network versions (for nv25).
• Continuous optimization: This change paves the way for future enhancements in loading and verification mechanisms.
🤝 Join the discussion
FIP-0100 is a crucial step towards a more efficient and sustainable Filecoin network. Your feedback is essential as we refine and implement these changes.
Let's build a stronger, more scalable Filecoin together.🚀
