The Truth Behind FIL's Long-Term Pressure: From Miner Electricity Costs to Supply and Demand Imbalance

Recently, many people have been asking what exactly is going on with FIL. Decentralized storage is a promising sector, the technology is solid, so why has the coin price been steadily declining? With the 2026 halving approaching and various rumors flying around, it’s becoming more confusing. Today, let’s start with the most overlooked issue—how are miners’ electricity costs calculated? Understanding this clearly will make FIL’s situation much clearer.

Simply put: decentralized storage is a good sector, but a good sector doesn’t guarantee the coin price will rise. FIL’s current predicament isn’t primarily a technical problem; it’s a real economic issue.

How are miners’ electricity costs calculated? The economic root of ongoing selling pressure

This is a point many haven’t thought through. The mining revenue model for FIL miners seems simple, but the cost structure is extremely complex.

Miner investments include three main parts: hardware costs, electricity, and daily operations. Among these, electricity is the most brutal ongoing expense. For a medium-sized miner deploying 100TB of storage, annual electricity costs might range from $5,000 to $15,000 (depending on regional electricity prices and hardware efficiency). This isn’t a one-time investment; it’s money spent every month.

More importantly, FIL miners have a 180-day coin unlocking period. This means the mined coins can’t be immediately sold, but costs like electricity are paid daily. Miners face a tough dilemma: either keep mining and keep burning money until the coins unlock, or sell immediately once unlocked. Most miners choose the latter.

This creates continuous selling pressure—coins are constantly unlocking, and miners are constantly selling. Plus, FIL’s inflation rate has been higher than the destruction rate, so supply remains oversaturated. Electricity costs act as an “invisible hand” forcing miners to sell coins to hedge costs. In the long run, this pressure is hard to eliminate unless:

1. FIL’s price significantly increases (making mining more profitable and covering higher costs)
2. Hardware efficiency improves dramatically (reducing electricity consumption proportionally)
3. Global green energy costs continue to decline (lowering miners’ cost base)

Currently, these three conditions are slowly improving but won’t change supply pressure in the short term.

The storage demand paradox: large capacity ≠ real demand

FIL’s total network storage capacity looks impressive, but there’s a well-known secret—a large proportion of the data is accumulated mainly for mining purposes.

Actual effective storage—enterprise and personal user data needs—is relatively small. This creates an awkward reality: storage networks are built, but there’s no genuine consumption demand to absorb it. From the economics of cloud storage, user demand mainly revolves around three points: cost, speed, and experience. Currently, FIL still falls short of the standards of centralized cloud storage in these areas.

Without real demand, there’s no sustained purchasing power. The coin’s price is fundamentally a game of supply and demand, and FIL is stuck in a deadlock of “oversupply and insufficient demand.” Solving this isn’t about quick technical upgrades; it requires real business scenarios and user growth.

The 2026 FIL halving: technological good news ≠ coin price explosion

To be clear: halving is a long-term positive, but don’t expect it to be a catalyst for overnight surges.

Halving will cut block rewards in half, directly reducing FIL’s daily issuance by 50%. From an inflation perspective, this is a real benefit—less new supply should theoretically improve supply-demand balance. But why hasn’t the market reacted yet?

The halving expectation is already priced in. Markets tend to anticipate good news in advance, and currently, it’s in a “wait-and-see” phase. Plus, the halving mechanism has some limitations:

• It only affects new issuance, not the accumulated unlocking and selling pressure. The mining sell-off discussed earlier will continue.
• Reducing supply alone isn’t enough; if demand doesn’t pick up, the price can’t move independently.
• The halving mechanism has been widely discussed and is already reflected in current prices.

The real opportunity likely requires three conditions to be met simultaneously: halving implementation + a bull market in the broader market + genuine storage demand and applications to take off. None of these are fully in place yet. Don’t rush to go all-in now.

Chip storage ≠ decentralized storage: don’t get caught up in concepts

Recently, some have been mixing FIL with chip storage concepts for hype. Here’s a clear distinction:

Chip storage is hardware-level—hard drives, SSDs, storage chips, responsible for physical data storage, and considered infrastructure.

FIL decentralized storage is a network protocol layer—connecting global hard drives, using sharding, tamper-proofing, and token incentives to upload data.

They’re not competing but complementary. Chip storage is the hardware foundation; FIL is the network layer. Advances in chip technology might improve miner efficiency, but that’s an engineering hardware issue, not a magic bullet for coin price. The notion that “chip storage benefits FIL” is mostly hype and concept association.

In the long run, FIL’s true growth drivers should be: real storage demand > chip technology improvements > miner cost optimization.

Summary: There’s a future, but this path won’t be easy

From electricity costs and supply-demand imbalance to market cycles, FIL faces real-world issues, not technical ones.

Decentralized storage is a long-term trend, and FIL, as a leading project, has value. But current problems are concrete: ongoing selling pressure from miner electricity costs, no explosive growth in real storage demand, and an uncertain market environment.

Halving is an important milestone, but don’t expect overnight gains. The chip storage concept is mostly hype—don’t get caught up in the hype.

Ultimately, trading tokens depends on supply, demand, and capital flows. For long-term holders, real-world adoption and data growth are key. FIL has potential, but every step on this road needs time to prove itself.