Filecoin storage in numbers. Providers down 87%, deals down 97%.

01 · The countFilecoin's storage market, counted from the first block

Every day, each storage provider on Filecoin gets a small test from the network. It answers with a proof, and the proof is written to the chain, where anyone can check it. At the end of August, 517 providers answered. At the end of September 2022, nearly eight times as many did.

Filecoin is a decentralized storage network. It is a DePIN project, short for decentralized physical infrastructure, where crypto rewards pay for real hardware. Here the hardware is hard drives. It has its own coin, FIL. Providers lock up FIL as collateral, store clients' files and earn newly minted FIL as block rewards. Miss a proof and the network fines them, and the fine is burned.

Bitquery keeps its own copy of the Filecoin chain, every message since the first block in August 2020. The same data powers our Filecoin API. We used it to measure the storage market: who supplies the space, how much data comes in, who pays for it, and how the new paid service is doing. We did not pick a verdict before the numbers came in. Where our copy has no figure, such as total capacity or the FIL price, we use the Filecoin Data Portal, a public dashboard of network data.

The market is much smaller than at its peak. Almost all the data still comes in through Fil+. The program gives providers a bigger share of block rewards for storing vetted client data, so clients usually pay nothing. A newer route for data grew fast in late 2025, and the paid service is growing from a very small base. We have run the same kind of count for the XRP Ledger and Optimism, and the rest of our work is on the investigations page.

02 · How it worksThree ways in, and a reward that favours client data

A provider packs data into sectors, fixed blocks of 32 or 64 GiB, and proves every 24 hours that it still has them. In return, providers win the right to make new blocks roughly in line with how much they store, and each block pays newly minted FIL.

Not all storage earns the same. Empty space, called committed capacity, counts once. Client data vetted under Fil+ counts 10 times, as the official Filecoin docs explain. The total the network pays out stays the same, and a bigger share of it goes to providers who store client data.

Allocators, the teams that vet clients for Fil+, hand out DataCap, a storage allowance measured in bytes. Clients spend it when they store data. Because Fil+ data earns providers more of the rewards, they usually store it for free. That is why most client data on Filecoin arrives without a payment.

Data can come in three ways. The original storage market records deals, each with its own ID. Since the April 2024 upgrade, direct onboarding lets providers add Fil+ data without a market deal. And Filecoin Onchain Cloud, live on mainnet since March, sells warm storage, data kept ready for quick access, and takes payment in stablecoins through a contract called Filecoin Pay.

03 · SupplyProviders proving storage are down 87% since 2022

The count rose fast in the first two years, peaked in 2022 and has fallen almost every month since. Providers were once called miners, and each still works under a miner ID, the on-chain identity that holds storage and sends proofs. One company can run several IDs, and some IDs share wallets. The chain does not record how many firms stand behind them.

Capacity fell further. Raw capacity, the disk space providers have pledged, is down 92% from its peak, on the Portal's figures. Quality-adjusted capacity, which counts Fil+ data 10 times, kept rising for another year and a half as client data made up more of what stayed. Then it fell by half.

With fewer providers, the biggest hold a larger share. The ten that win the most blocks now take more than twice the share they had at the low point in early 2024. That is still far below launch, when the ten biggest took two in every five.

04 · DealsNew deals are down 97% from their peak

Deals fell harder than providers. The original market peaked three years ago at almost 4.8 million deals in a month. In August there were about one thirtieth as many, filed by 15 wallets. At the peak, hundreds of wallets were filing them.

Nearly all of them are Fil+ deals. At the peak, all but one in every five thousand came with a Fil+ allocation. So the deal count is really a count of Fil+ data, which clients usually get for free.

05 · The other routePart of the flow moved to direct onboarding

Some of that data took a new route. Direct onboarding came in bursts at first, then took off in the autumn of last year. For six months it carried between a third and two thirds of new Fil+ pieces, sent by no more than 29 client wallets in any month. Then it shrank too.

Counting both routes, new pieces of client data are down 95% from their peak. Measured in bytes, the fall looks the same. The Fil+ data that providers claim each month is down to about one twenty-fifth of its peak.

06 · DataCapFewer grants, from fewer hands

Every Fil+ deal, on either route, starts with a grant of DataCap. Allocators receive it in batches from Fil+ root-key holders and pass it on to clients they have checked. Grants fell from more than 300 per month at the peak to a handful in August.

From spring 2025 most of them came through smart contracts. One contract made more than a thousand grants on its own, so there may be more allocators involved than the number of granting addresses suggests.

07 · Other explanationsBatching, price and planned expiry

Three other things could explain part of the fall. The first is batching. Transaction counts are a common health check for a blockchain, and our Cardano study used them too. On Filecoin they can mislead. At its busiest, in May 2021, the chain carried almost forty times as many Filecoin messages as it did in August. More than nine in ten of that month's messages were one message per sector. Upgrades later let providers file sectors in batches, so much of the drop reflects how providers file and says little about how much they store.

The second is the FIL price. Provider numbers follow it only loosely. In the same month the two move together a little. Even that rests heavily on one month early in the 2021 bull run, when both jumped. Leave that month out and the link almost halves. With a delay of one to three months there is no steady link at all.

The third is planned expiry. Since January the Portal has split storage that expired on schedule from storage ended early. Expiry was the larger of the two in every month except July, when a little more ended early than expired. So most of the storage leaving the network had simply reached the end of its term.

08 · Who paysPaid demand is small next to block rewards

Providers earn in two ways, from block rewards paid by the protocol and from payments by clients. The Filecoin strategy for 2026 calls for a shift "away from growing supply and towards scaling demand". On-chain, paid demand is still small. Over the past year providers earned 24.5 million FIL in block rewards, about $31.3 million at the Portal's daily FIL price.

Clients paid far less through the channels the chain records. On the old market, a settlement moves a deal's price from the client to the provider. There were nearly eighteen million of them from the first, in May 2025, to the end of August, and together they paid less than a tenth of a FIL. In mid-September, 11 settlements added more than all the earlier ones combined.

Onchain Cloud's warm storage, the newest paid service, took about 5 cents for every $1,000 of block rewards over the same year.

Some payments leave no message on the chain. Deals activated before the April 2024 upgrade still settle on a schedule inside the market's own books, as FIP-0074 sets out, so we cannot see them. Clients can also pay providers off-chain. The figures here cover only what was paid on-chain.

The network also burns FIL. Over the same year about 2.00 million FIL was burned. More than half of it was fees providers paid to end storage early. Most of the rest was fees and fines the protocol takes on its own, such as a daily per-sector fee added last year. Gas burned by every message on the network came to about one FIL in every four hundred.

09 · Onchain CloudThe new paid service is growing from a small base

Onchain Cloud checks its warm storage with a daily proof and takes payment in stablecoins. Its contracts have been live since late 2025, and the official blog said it was live on mainnet in March. From the end of November to the end of August, its paying clients nearly doubled, by the Portal's count. The datasets they store grew about eight times over.

The money is still small. Warm storage took $1,676 from November to the end of August, most of it in June and July, and August brought less than July.

Filecoin Pay, the payment contract underneath, moves money through payment streams, each linking one payer to one payee. Warm-storage streams are run by the warm-storage contract. Filecoin Pay moved $53,932 over the same months, on the Portal's figures, and almost all of it came from one wallet paying one address.

That wallet opened its own stream on 4 August and ran it itself, with no storage check attached. On 18 August it deposited 62,900 axlUSDC, a bridged version of USDC, and paid $50,251 through the stream in a little over an hour. The address on the other end has never been paid for warm storage.

Whatever those payments were for, they did not go through Onchain Cloud's warm-storage service.

10 · What is leftA smaller market, fed mostly by Fil+ data

Filecoin today stores less, with fewer providers. Almost all the new data we can count since 2023 arrived as Fil+ data, which clients usually do not pay for. The newest growth came from outside the original market, first through direct onboarding and now through Onchain Cloud, whose paying clients nearly doubled in nine months.

What clients pay for that storage is still tiny next to block rewards. The number to watch is warm storage, which took $312 in August and $369 in the first 20 days of September.

11 · How we countedWhat the data can and cannot show

Our copy of the chain has gaps in parts of 15 months, mostly around network upgrades. Those months appear as fainter bars in the provider and route charts, and no figure here is compared against them. For those months, deal counts come from the chain's own deal counter.

Our copy does not keep what is inside each message. So the size, price and client of each old-market deal are out of reach, and we count direct-onboarding pieces rather than bytes. Payments made off-chain, and scheduled payouts for deals activated before April 2024, leave no messages at all.

Capacity, the FIL price and Onchain Cloud payments come from the Portal. Its capacity figures match Filfox and a threshold the chain itself records. Our own count of Fil+ bytes matches the Portal's within 1% in 33 of the 35 clean months where the Portal has a figure. Its price could not be checked against a second source over time. The payment stream behind the August money comes from the Portal's payment records and from Filfox, which shows each contract call.

12 · The recordThe actors and wallets behind these numbers