Originally published at mrnasdog.com/research/fil/inflation by MrNasdog.
Filecoin put 35.18M FIL onto the market over the last 90 days, and only 5.46M of it was newly minted. The founder and foundation vesting schedule released 16.84M FIL, and storage-provider pledge collateral handed back as network capacity retires released another 12.88M. Against all of that Filecoin runs no buyback of any kind and a fee-and-penalty burn worth 624.6K FIL. The MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads +4.18% net over the trailing 90 days and +3.05% forward, against a supply-monitor reading of +4.69%. The forward number falls for one reason and one reason only: the FIL vesting schedule terminates Oct 14 2026.
The verdict, in one paragraph
Over the last 90 days the MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads Filecoin at +4.18% net: 35.18M FIL of sell-side supply against 624.6K FIL of buy-side offset, on a circulating base of 826.81M FIL. The supply monitor reads the same window at +4.69%, a gap of 0.51 percentage points — over tolerance, so this build ships a monitor-gap chip and ran the full reconciliation walk. That walk decomposed the gap completely and did not close it: 0.20 points is base convention, because the monitor measures the same flow against the smaller supply of 90 days ago, and 0.31 points is classification, because the classified series moved +37.05M FIL where Filecoin's own on-chain circulating-supply state moved +34.56M. The framework kept the chain reading, which closes to 0.000000 FIL against the protocol's vested, mined, burnt and locked identity. FIL is structurally inflationary on a shrinking schedule: heavily inflationary today, materially less so from the middle of October, and never deflationary while the mint runs and no burn scales with it.
Sell pressure: where new FIL comes from
The first thing to understand about Filecoin inflation is that the block-reward mint — the number most people quote — is the smallest of the three taps. Sell #1, protocol inflation, minted 5.46M FIL over the window, about 22.1M FIL a year against a circulating base of 826.81M. Filecoin pays that reward from two halves, a simple mint on a six-year half-life and a baseline mint indexed to how much storage capacity the network actually carries, and both halves are shrinking. The monthly slices prove it without any modelling: 1.86M, then 1.82M, then 1.78M FIL. Filecoin's emission is epoch-indexed rather than block-indexed, and Filecoin epoch timestamps are defined as a fixed 30 seconds from genesis, so there is no block-rate correction to apply here and this build applied none.
Sell #2, vesting unlocks, is the biggest tap in the window at 16.84M FIL — three times the mint. This is the Filecoin genesis allocation to Protocol Labs and the Filecoin Foundation, and this build read its schedule off the chain rather than off a calendar. Seven on-chain vesting accounts hold it, six of 50M FIL each and one of 100M FIL, and all seven return the identical start epoch and the identical 6,307,200-epoch unlock duration. That fixes the end of the 400M FIL vest at epoch 6,456,088, which is Oct 14 2026, with roughly 7.5M FIL still to come and nothing after it. The realised rate is 64.974165 FIL per epoch and was identical in all three 30-day slices of the window, so this is a straight line with a hard stop, not a forecast. Note that the SAFT investor tranches are a separate and already-finished story — those completed in 2023; the October 2026 date is the founder and foundation schedule.
Sell #4, long-term locked, is the tap nobody quotes and the one with no end date: 12.88M FIL came back onto the float as Filecoin's locked pool fell from 78.17M to 65.29M FIL. Two things sit in that pool. One is the pledge collateral every Filecoin storage provider must post against the sectors it commits, which is returned when those sectors retire — and Filecoin capacity has been retiring. The other is the three-quarters of every Filecoin block reward that vests over 180 days, which drains faster than a shrinking mint can refill it. Both point the same way, and unlike the vesting schedule neither has a completion date. Sell #3, foundation and unscheduled unlocks, is a measured zero: Filecoin's 300M mining reserve account held 282.93M FIL at both ends of the window and moved by exactly nothing.
Buy pressure: where new FIL goes
Filecoin's buy side is one row. Buy #2, the protocol fee burn, destroyed 624.6K FIL over the window — read directly off the burn account balance, which rose from 42.28M to 42.90M FIL, and cross-checked against Filecoin's own published burnt figure, which matched to the last decimal. Two Filecoin mechanisms feed that single account: the base fee every message pays, and the penalties and termination fees storage providers pay when they miss a proof or drop capacity early. Because both destroy into the same account, they are one row and not two, and the second-quarter spike in that row is the penalty side, not the fee side. Against 35.18M FIL of supply arriving, a 624.6K FIL burn offsets about 1.8%.
The other three buy rows are zero, and it matters that they are zero for structural reasons rather than for want of looking. Buy #1, programmatic buyback: Filecoin has none. The project's own 2026 network strategy describes no buyback, no treasury purchase and no burn programme, and nothing in Filecoin's protocol routes storage revenue into buying FIL. Readers should also know that a site advertising an official Filecoin Foundation buyback paying up to 9.75 times market surfaced while researching this page; it appears on no Filecoin surface, and it was ignored. Buy #3, foundation buy, is zero for the same reason — the Filecoin Foundation is structurally a net seller here, since its allocation vests out to it. Buy #4, new long-term lock, is zero because Filecoin locking moved the other way this window: new pledge collateral is being posted every day, just less of it than is being handed back, and that single net flow is already counted on the sell side. Counting it twice would be the easiest error to make on this coin.
Foundation and overhang
Two team-controlled overhangs sit above the Filecoin ledger. The first is the 300M FIL mining reserve, of which 17.07M has ever been disbursed, leaving 282.93M FIL in the reserve account today. It has no release schedule at all and cannot be spent without a governance-approved change to the Filecoin protocol; both its balance and the disbursed total were identical at the two ends of this window, refreshed by direct chain read. The second is the 12.90M FIL still held across the seven founder and foundation vesting accounts, all of which unlocks by Oct 14 2026 and is already carried in the Sell #2 forward figure. Filecoin has no DAO treasury distinct from these and no bankruptcy estate. If either overhang's balance falls between refreshes, the outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh — and for the mining reserve that would be visible in advance, because releasing it requires a public Filecoin improvement proposal before it requires a transaction.
How FIL compares to other uncapped-emission storage and infrastructure chains
Filecoin sits in an unusual place among proof-of-capacity and infrastructure networks. Against a halving-model chain with a hard cap, FIL looks superficially similar — Filecoin does have a 2B FIL protocol cap and a decaying mint — but the resemblance breaks immediately, because a halving chain's entire supply story is its block subsidy, while Filecoin's subsidy is the smallest of three flows. A reader modelling FIL as a halving asset would be tracking 16% of the actual supply arriving.
Against an uncapped continuous-emission Layer 1 with a fee burn, the difference is the burn's scale relative to issuance. Chains that burn their base fee in full can flip deflationary in a busy quarter because the burn rises with usage until it crosses the mint. Filecoin's burn is real and is measured the same way, but at 624.6K FIL against 35.18M of arriving supply it is nowhere near that crossover, and storage demand does not generate gas the way trading does. The third comparison is the most useful: exchange tokens and revenue-sharing protocols that run quarterly buybacks pull supply off the market with treasury cash, which is exactly the mechanism Filecoin does not have. FIL has no buyback, so its only counter-flow is a burn that scales with network activity and network failure rather than with revenue.
Where Filecoin is genuinely distinctive is the collateral channel. Because every Filecoin storage provider must lock FIL against committed capacity, Filecoin's float expands when the network shrinks and contracts when it grows. That inverts the usual reading of a network metric: a quarter of falling Filecoin capacity is a quarter of rising FIL float, independent of the mint, the vest and the burn. No halving chain and no fee-burn Layer 1 has that property, and it is the reason FIL's forward number does not fall to the mint rate after October.
What to watch in the next 90 days
First, Oct 14 2026 — the epoch at which the Filecoin founder and foundation vest terminates. Roughly 7.5M FIL remains to be released before it, and nothing after. This is the single largest scheduled change to FIL supply since launch and it is already priced into the forward reading on this page.
Second, the Filecoin reward-split proposal known as Solstice, which was accepted but carries no activation epoch and therefore changed no row in this build. It would divide each Filecoin block reward three ways and burn the share that unproven service demand does not earn — the first Filecoin mechanism that would scale a burn with issuance rather than with gas. Watch for it being scheduled into a named network upgrade.
Third, Filecoin network capacity. The collateral tap is now the largest one with no end date, and it is driven entirely by the rate at which committed storage retires. A stabilisation in Filecoin capacity would cut Sell #4 sharply; a faster decline would raise it. Fourth, the 282.93M FIL mining reserve — any Filecoin improvement proposal to disburse it would be the largest single supply event available to this network. Fifth, the block-reward mint itself, which fell in each of the three monthly slices this build measured; if that decay continues, Sell #1 drops below 5.3M FIL next quarter without any protocol change at all.
Summary
The MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads Filecoin at +4.18% net over the trailing 90 days and +3.05% forward, making FIL structurally inflationary on a schedule that is about to improve. The mechanism to understand is that Filecoin's block-reward mint is the smallest of three supply taps: the founder and foundation vest contributed 16.84M FIL and returned storage collateral 12.88M, against 5.46M newly minted. The key risk is that only one of those three taps has a completion date — the vest ends Oct 14 2026, while the collateral released by retiring Filecoin capacity has no schedule and grows precisely when the network shrinks. The ceiling is the 2B FIL protocol cap, comfortably distant against 826.81M circulating, which means the constraint on FIL is not scarcity but the absence of any buy-side mechanism: no buyback, and a burn currently offsetting under 2% of what arrives.
MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of FIL, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated Sep 5 2026.
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