Filecoin completed its Solstice mainnet upgrade on Oct. 19, starting a shift in block rewards toward registered Service Orchestrators as the storage network seeks stronger evidence of paying demand.
The upgrade was scheduled to activate at 8:59:30 a.m. EDT (12:59:30 UTC). Filecoin’s status page separately marked scheduled maintenance complete at 9:59 a.m. EDT (13:59 UTC).
The reward schedule outlined ahead of Solstice assigns 5% of new block rewards to the service stream at activation and 95% to consensus miners. The only Service Orchestrator registered initially held the entire service share.
That allocation rises to 10% during the first protocol quarter, counted from the upgrade rather than the calendar. Later increases come in five-percentage-point steps and depend on qualifying Filecoin Pay volume meeting specified dollar thresholds.
The quarterly calculation counts settlements on admitted contracts between registered payer–operator pairs after reporting and verification. Those rules determine how the service share is divided among registered operators after the initial period.
Filecoin’s proposal maps a roughly nine-quarter path toward a 50% floor for consensus miners’ direct share. Service rewards that are not earned are burned. The proposal identifies Service Orchestrators and clients seeking paid services as intended beneficiaries; consensus-focused providers would receive a smaller direct share as the service allocation grows.
Solstice also ends the Filecoin Plus DataCap approval process. New storage sectors receive maximum quality-adjusted power by default. Eligible active sectors below that level can be upgraded, subject to any required increase in pledged collateral.
The proposal argues that human DataCap checks delayed new clients and could reward activity unrelated to genuine storage demand. Its payment rules aim to tie service rewards more closely to demand, though settlement records alone cannot establish whether transactions reflect independent customers.
The first payment-dependent increase, from 10% to 15%, can be considered after reported volume from the second protocol quarter becomes final. Qualifying volume must reach the first $3,500 threshold, and any increase faces a timelock after verification. SRA Governance must assess possible self-dealing in the reported settlements.
