Additional insights from web3 reward emission research

[robertk16]

We are currently undertaking a large-scale research effort to create better frameworks for token mechanics especially for web3 protocols in the hardware resource provisioning sector.

We have recently published part one, where we have compared emission schedules of various web3 networks, including of course Filecoin. You can find the report here.

However, we wanted to share some additional data with the Filecoin community that is not in the report.

First off, we have classified Filecoin’s token rewards to be in the category of KPI-driven and decaying emissions. Given Filecoin’s dual minting has two components, they also fall actually in different categories:
the simple-minting is fixed and decaying, i.e. the token rewards are decaying by a fixed timeline (halving every 6 years)
the baseline-minting is KPI-driven and decaying: the token rewards are also decaying, but the emission is dependent on the network capacity as KPI

As the latter has significantly more impact on the aggregated token emissions, we decided to categorize the aggregated token rewards as such.

Within that category, there are currently also the following projects we analyzed:

• Akash
• NYM

In comparison to the other projects in this category, Filecoin’s relative emissions are in the middle to lower range, which also allows for the less steep decay of emissions over time compared to other decaying schedules. This is also reflected in the cumulative sum over those, i.e. Filecoin has emitted less than 15% of the total FIL supply so far on token rewards which is actually the lowest value of all Web3 infrastructure networks we analyzed at this time.

The below chart shows the average (blue line) and the interquartile range (blue shaded) of the monthly token rewards of all Web3 infrastructure networks together with the projects of the KPI-driven and decaying emissions category highlighted:

Next, we looked into the dollar value of those emissions, to compare how miners are actually getting compensated:

In contrast to the relative token emissions, Filecoin’s rewards in dollar-terms are the highest among all Web3 networks we analyzed. This is of course largely impacted by the tailwinds on the price of the 2021 bull market.

However, for Filecoin, it might be more important to compare it to the networks providing similar services versus projects with similar token emissions. So here we go:

Arweave's and Sia's reward emissions follow a fixed-decaying schedule like Filecoin's simple minting. However, there are some caveats contrasting these numbers (as always), e.g. Sia's storage providers are not paid with those rewards.

More such caveats, information, and data are available in this repo which also contains the paper with further details on the published report. We hope this information yields some insightful information for the Filecoin community and are open to your feedback. What additional data would you want to see / topics to dive into?