Understand Collateral

Understanding the Miner Actor

The Filecoin Miner Actor generally holds FIL in 3 "buckets":

1. Available balance - the liquid FIL held on the Miner Actor that is available for withdrawing by the Miner's owner

2. Vesting balance - the illiquid FIL that vests, earned from winning block rewards from storage mining

3. Pledged collateral - FIL that is already pledged to the network for storing data

Generally, when you look at a healthy Miner Actor, the buckets look something like this:

Miner Actor Equity

Equity value - in general, GLIF treats all these balances as collateral within the system, and refers to them as the Miner Actor's "equity value". See the Storage Provider Equity section for more details.

Liquidation values and recovery rates

The next concepts that are important to understand are liquidation values, recovery rates, and risk of loss:

• Liquidation value - the amount of FIL you should expect to receive after terminating the Miner and all of its sectors

• Recovery rate - the % of FIL you would expect to recover from the Miner after terminating the Miner and all of its sectors

• Risk of loss - the amount of FIL you stand to lose in a liquidation event

Equity Value	Recovery Rate	Liquidation Value	Risk of loss
1000 FIL	70%	700 FIL	300 FIL
500 FIL	50%	250 FIL	250 FIL
250 FIL	100%	250 FIL	0 FIL

Over-collateralization

During our 18 month research phase, we conducted several termination simulations to better understand recovery rates and liquidation values on Filecoin. On average, our research shows an average network recovery rate of roughly 60%, which means (on average), the risk of loss on any FIL deployed to SPs hovers around 40%.

It's now much easier to describe the conservative economic models:

Storage Providers must lock an amount of equity in the protocol equal to the amount of funds they wish to borrow.

When you write out the math, and assume an average recovery rate of 60%, you can see how (theoretically), the risk of loss on the GLIF pool is 0 FIL. For instance, imagine the following scenario:

• Storage Provider equity - 1000 FIL

• Storage Provider borrowed funds - 1000 FIL

• Storage Provider total funds - 2000 FIL

In this example, the Storage Provider has borrowed an equal amount of FIL as they have in equity. In other words, the Storage Provider brought 1000 FIL to the protocol, and then borrowed another 1000 FIL, summing to a total of 2000 FIL held by the Storage Provider. Now imagine a liquidation event that recovers 60% of funds, recovering 40%:

• Recovered funds - 1200 FIL

• Lost funds - 800 FIL

Since the pool recoups its FIL before the SP does, the pool did not lose any money after liquidating this Storage Provider:

• Pool lent funds: 1000 FIL

• Pool recovered funds: 1200 FIL

• Pool loss: 0 FIL

In this example, the Storage Provider will actually recoup 200 FIL after the liquidation finishes.