The “king of bottomless pits” even worse than ETC—why people say FIL can never recover in the secondary market?

After chatting about ETC, the doomsday vehicle, we absolutely have to talk today about the famous “storage king” in the industry—Filecoin (FIL), which has caused countless old retail investors to go bankrupt.

Back then, riding on grand narratives like “replacing traditional HTTP, disrupting Amazon AWS with unified Web3 storage,” FIL was pumped all the way up to an all-time high of $237 in 2021. But today, FIL’s price is only left at a pitiful $0.72—down 99.7% from its peak! Many old-timers see it falling so terribly and think it has solid fundamentals in distributed storage, so they keep wanting to “buy the dip.”
Today I’ll put it plainly: as long as FIL’s tokenomics don’t change, in the secondary market it will always be a “bottomless pit” that devours retail capital, and anyone who blindly holds on will end up as cannon fodder.
Why do they say FIL is basically impossible to touch? Three deadly traps that are truly thought-provoking:
🚨 Deadly trap one: terrifying malicious inflation—storage servers are a “relentless money-printing machine”
Many people mistakenly think FIL has already bottomed out, but they ignore the extremely frightening persistent inflation behind it.
A yearly inflation rate of up to ~21%: to incentivize storage providers (miners), the FIL network relentlessly mints and releases roughly 130 million to 140 million new FIL tokens every year out of thin air.
“Rigid sell pressure” from miners: In reality, storage servers require high hardware costs, data-center hosting fees, and huge electricity bills. Miners aren’t charities. Every day after they mine new coins, their only move is to blindly dump them on the secondary market to cover real operating costs. That’s several dozen million RMB per day of rigid sell pressure—paid for by retail investors in the secondary market using real money to keep taking the hit!

🚨 Deadly trap two: “cross-century” relief-sell pressure from early capital
Besides miners dumping, early frontline investment institutions and teams are also continuously draining funds.
FIL conducted an ICO in 2017 worth as much as $205 million. Back then, the cost for institutions to obtain the tokens was so low it’s shocking—only a few cents or a few tenths of a cent.
These tokens have extremely long linear unlock schedules. This means that even if the coin price is now down to $0.72, for those early VCs and the team back then, it still represents multiple times or even more than ten times pure profit. No matter at what price they unlock, they will choose to keep selling without any psychological burden.
🚨 Deadly trap three: grand narrative versus business reality—complete disconnect
FIL’s biggest technical slogan is decentralized storage. But the awkward business reality is:
Cold-storage monetization difficulties: its architecture is better suited for long-term “cold data” backups that aren’t frequently read, and it can’t meet the storage throughput needs of today’s AI large models and Web3 blockbuster applications for “high-frequency, high-speed, hot data.”
Enterprise clients don’t buy it: now, when enterprises and AI giants choose servers, the first factors are stability, security, and the ecosystem chain. They’re more willing to store core data on traditional AWS or Google Cloud. Even if FIL has now launched “FVM smart contracts” and “on-chain cloud,” it still faces an enormous “application gap.” There’s 25 EB of hardware space on-chain, but there’s simply no counterpart commercial buyer willing to pay.

💡 Summary: FIL’s underlying fate is “fracture after fracture”
ETC has no applications and is just kept afloat by hype and sentimentality, a hollow shell.
FIL is a “bleeding without end” model where the larger the hardware scale becomes, the more new coins get produced—and the more intense the dumping and sell pressure.
When trading FIL in the secondary market, never believe the so-called “distributed storage is the Holy Grail of the future.” Its ecosystem has already completely decoupled from the coin price.
Its only survival value: when the technology upgrades or the market goes crazy over the “DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure)” concept, it follows the sector and shows impulsive oversold rebounds of 20%-30%.
Retail investors’ survival rule: treat it as a pure short-term trader passing through. Catch a rebound and run—never stay a second longer.
Anyone trying long-term DCA or “hodling” dreams of returning to the three-digit glory era will ultimately be worn down to nothing by endless inflation sell pressure.

Brothers from Gate, have you paid tuition on FIL? At the current price of $0.72, do you think it’s a golden pit where it can’t drop any further, or is it still a bottomless pit going lower? Welcome to spar in the comments! #FIL #Filecoin #分布式存储 #DePIN