Filecoin News: Network Gets Smaller but Storage Use Hits New High

Key Takeaways:

• Penalties surged after the v27 upgrade, removing non-compliant operators.
• Capacity dropped, but utilization increased as storage shifted to long-term datasets.
• Enterprise archival data remained stable despite fewer new storage deals.
• DeFi weakened, while governance and DataCap allocations expanded.

Rather than pursuing sheer capacity growth or high deal throughput, the system is now being shaped around operators who can provide stable, compliant, and verifiable storage over time.

The decisive turning point was the v27 “Golden Week” upgrade. The new rules imposed higher requirements for reliability and data maintenance, and operators that could not adjust were removed by the protocol’s enforcement mechanism. This shift is visible in the economic data: network fees increased, but almost the entire rise came from penalties issued to miners who failed to meet the updated standards. The change subdued the low-value activity that previously inflated Filecoin’s capacity metrics.

As non-compliant operators exited, Filecoin’s total committed storage fell 10% to 3.0 EiB. However, with fewer idle or speculative sectors, the share of actually used capacity improved. Utilization increased from 32% to 36% quarter-over-quarter, showing that the remaining capacity is serving real workloads rather than subsidy-driven storage. Daily new storage deals declined from 3.4 PiB to 2.8 PiB, but total active stored data dropped only 1% to 1,110 PiB — a sign that commercial and institutional usage did not pull back even as speculative activity fell.

Growth was driven almost entirely by real-world data. The network closed the quarter with 2,491 datasets online, up 3%. A large portion of these are now extremely large archives rather than short-term experiments. Major cultural and scientific institutions onboarded material during the period, reinforcing Filecoin’s role as a storage platform for high-value archival data rather than temporary transactional use cases.

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The financial ecosystem around Filecoin did not trend in the same direction. The DeFi segment of the network continued to contract as total value locked fell 8.4% to $27 million, and liquidity staking declined by roughly 7%. Token flows remained active but fell in dollar terms due to a modest price drop in FIL. In contrast, governance and verified-storage programs moved forward, including ProPGF Batch 1, RetroPGF Round 3, and continued expansion of the Fil+ Allocator initiative.

Overall, Filecoin’s third quarter emphasized quality of storage rather than scale of storage. The system rewarded professional operators and enterprise workloads while reducing space for miners that relied on volume-based incentives or low-effort participation.

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