Filecoin (FIL) Burn

Unlike most tokens in this ledger, Filecoin has no "burn events": every FIL destroyed is a transfer into f099, an account created in the genesis block on 24 Aug 2020 that has received 1.35 billion transfers. Three sources: (1) base fee — every message pays a base fee that adjusts to block fullness, and that part is burned EIP-1559-style; (2) fees for landing messages on chain plus part of over-estimated gas (the overestimation burn); (3) penalties — pledge forfeited when a storage provider lets sectors fault, misses WindowPoSt or terminates sectors early, and since 14 Apr 2025 the daily per-sector fee under FIP-0100.

As of 3 Sep 2026: 42,898,125 FIL burned, 2.14% of the 2B hard cap and 5.2% of the 826.7M circulating. Of that, 3.52M was burned before the daily series starts (genesis to Liftoff on 15 Oct 2020, the initial capacity-onboarding period) and 39.37M is spread over the 2,147 days since. Latest pace: 35,473 FIL in the 16 days to 3 Sep 2026, or 2,217 a day.

Burn by year: 2020 (77 days) 6.30M; 2021 19.26M; 2022 5.06M; 2023 4.86M; 2024 1.28M; 2025 1.10M; 2026 to 1 Sep 1.52M. 2020–2021 alone account for 25.6M, 60% of lifetime. December 2020 burned 4.97M and January 2021 4.72M — the two record months; the record day is 23 Mar 2021 at 249,964 FIL, and the 15 largest burn days in history all fall between 11 Dec 2020 and 23 Apr 2021, each above 190K.

The cause was congestion: each 32 GiB sector onboarded needs gas-heavy PreCommit/ProveCommit messages, providers raced to add capacity, blocks stayed full and the base fee — the burned part — climbed geometrically. The v13 HyperDrive upgrade on 30 Jun 2021 (FIP-0008, FIP-0013) allowed up to 819 proofs to be aggregated into one message, cutting onboarding gas 10–25×; monthly burn fell from 1.87M (May 2021) to 810K (Jun 2021) to 360K (Jul 2021) and never returned to seven figures.

Two later plateaus: Mar–Oct 2022 steady at 350–720K a month, and Mar–Jun 2023 back up to 730–948K a month — coinciding with the FVM virtual machine going live on mainnet (nv18, 14 Mar 2023) and pushing gas up; this ledger records the coincidence in timing and cannot separate the fee and penalty shares. From September 2023 monthly burn dropped below 160K and since 2024 most months sit in the 35–120K range.

At the lower base the line turns jagged in a different way: the 2024 daily median is 1,630 FIL, 2025's 1,716 — that is the fee floor; the rest arrives in lumps. April 2024 256K and June 2024 214K; 30 Jun 2025 81,505 and 9 Jul 2025 66,193 (two days = 13% of all of 2025); 2 Mar 2026 52,456 and 7 Mar 2026 38,101. These lumps have the shape of sector-termination penalties — a provider pulling many sectors early has its pledge burned in one day — but the ledger sees the transfer into f099, not who paid.

From mid-2025 the monthly floor rose: 33–72K a month in the first half of 2025 to 116–170K in the second, then 2026: January 236K, February 152K, March 299K, April 74K, May 115K, June 121K, July ~441K, August 75K. Eight months of 2026 sum to 1.52M, already past all of 2025 (1.10M) and 2024 (1.28M). Part of it is structural: FIP-0100 (nv25 Teep, 14 Apr 2025) replaced the batch balancer with a daily per-sector fee that is burned — 1.61817×10⁻²⁵ × circulating supply × QAP bytes, about 3,781 nanoFIL a day per 32 GiB sector at 680M supply — applied to new sectors and, after a 90-day grace period (nv26), to extended ones; it grows as old sectors roll over, but the ledger cannot separate it from the total.

The July 2026 episode is the largest since 2023: by Filfox's f099 balance checkpoints, 4→19 Jul rose 194,350 and 19 Jul→3 Aug rose 239,384 — 434K FIL in 30 days, 6–7× the floor, then 18 Aug→3 Sep back to 2,217 a day. This ledger has not identified the source; the shape (one high month, then off) looks more like a large sector termination than fees. Note the daily series from 29 Apr 2026 is interpolated between 15-day checkpoints, so on the chart this shows as two flat steps, not a spike.

The Mint column is block rewards paid to storage providers per the Filecoin Data Portal dataset: 397.4M FIL from 17 Oct 2020 to 28 Apr 2026, 9.3× the total burn. The daily average falls steadily: 2020 195K, 2021 337K, 2022 295K, 2023 202K, 2024 112K, 2025 80K, 2026 (to 28 Apr) 67K — the result of simple minting decaying on a 6-year half-life plus baseline minting slowing while network capacity sits below the baseline curve; the ledger does not split the two components.

Mint-to-burn by year: 2021 6.4:1; 2022 21:1; 2023 15:1; 2024 32:1; 2025 27:1; the latest eight months with matched data (1 Sep 2025–28 Apr 2026) 16.9M minted vs 1.25M burned = 13.5:1. True issuance is higher still: the Mint column excludes FIL vesting to Protocol Labs, the Filecoin Foundation and SAFT investors — circulating supply grows from those too. The Mint column stops at 28 Apr 2026 because the source dataset stopped updating; the ledger does not estimate block rewards on its own.

ATH $236.84 on 1 Apr 2021 — right in the record burn season, when over 200K FIL was destroyed daily; ATL $0.61 on 18 Aug 2026, 99.7% below peak (CoinGecko). At the August 2026 low the lifetime burn is worth about $26M; the same amount at the peak price was $10.2B.

Circulating supply is 826.7M (CoinGecko). The "total supply" of 1,957,101,908 shown by aggregators is the 2B cap minus what has been burned — meaning 1.13B FIL not yet issued, to come through block rewards and vesting over decades. So 42.9M burned is 2.1% of the cap but 5.2% of what circulates; the second figure better reflects the effect on real supply.

Total burn: the f099 balance read via Lotus RPC (Filecoin.StateGetActor) on every run. Daily series: to 28 Apr 2026, differences of the cumulative burnt_fil column in the Filecoin Data Portal's filecoin_daily_metrics (with its block-reward column for Mint); that dataset stopped updating on 29 Apr 2026 (last-modified 29 Apr 2026), so from then the ledger reads Filfox's f099 balance checkpoints (~one per 15 days) and spreads each evenly across days. The interpolation error is in placement within the 15 days, not in the total: the series still sums to the on-chain balance.

Reconciliation: 39,369,340 FIL in the daily series + 3,524,000 burned before 16 Oct 2020 + two days not yet in the data ≈ the 42,898,125 f099 balance — within 5,000 FIL, about two days of floor burn. USD in the state card = quantity × price at the time the page was last updated. There is no revenue, buyback or unlock column; the ledger does not use Lotus for history because public nodes keep only a few days of state.