Key Developments Following Filecoin's v27 Upgrade
The Filecoin network has undergone a significant transformation following its v27 "Golden Week" upgrade, shifting its focus from sheer capacity growth to operators providing stable, compliant, and verifiable storage over time. This upgrade introduced stricter requirements for reliability and data maintenance, leading to the removal of non-compliant operators by the protocol's enforcement mechanism.
The economic impact of this change is evident in the network fees, which saw an increase primarily due to penalties issued to miners who failed to meet the updated standards. This measure effectively subdued the low-value activity that previously inflated Filecoin's capacity metrics.
Impact on Network Capacity and Utilization
As a result of non-compliant operators exiting the network, Filecoin's total committed storage decreased by 10% to 3.0 EiB. However, this reduction in idle or speculative sectors led to an improvement in the utilization of actual capacity. The utilization rate increased from 32% to 36% quarter-over-quarter, indicating that the remaining capacity is now serving real workloads rather than being driven by subsidies.
While the number of daily new storage deals declined from 3.4 PiB to 2.8 PiB, the total active stored data experienced only a minor drop of 1% to 1,110 PiB. This stability in stored data suggests that commercial and institutional usage remained robust, even as speculative activity waned.
Growth Driven by Real-World Data and Archival Storage
The growth observed on the network during this period was predominantly driven by real-world data. The network concluded the quarter with 2,491 datasets online, marking a 3% increase. A significant portion of these datasets are now large archives, rather than short-term experimental storage solutions.
Major cultural and scientific institutions contributed to this trend by onboarding material, further solidifying Filecoin's position as a platform for high-value archival data, moving away from temporary transactional use cases.
Financial Ecosystem Trends and Governance Expansion
The financial ecosystem surrounding Filecoin presented a different trend, with its Decentralized Finance (DeFi) segment continuing to contract. The total value locked in DeFi fell by 8.4% to $27 million, and liquidity staking saw a decline of approximately 7%. Token flows remained active but decreased in dollar terms due to a modest drop in the price of FIL.
In contrast, the governance and verified-storage programs experienced forward momentum. Notable initiatives included ProPGF Batch 1, RetroPGF Round 3, and the continued expansion of the Fil+ Allocator initiative.
Emphasis on Storage Quality Over Scale
In summary, Filecoin's third quarter was characterized by an emphasis on the quality of storage rather than its overall scale. The system has been structured to reward professional operators and enterprise workloads, while simultaneously reducing the space for miners who relied on volume-based incentives or low-effort participation.