One of the most economically significant applications of the Filecoin Virtual Machine is the provisioning of on-demand financing to Filecoin Storage Providers (SPs). Starboard’s DeFi Leaderboard aims to provide a forensic view into staking and leasing activities driven by DeFi protocols that leverage the FVM.
These metrics are calculated on a protocol basis. Additionally, the Leaderboard also calculates the same metrics for a group labelled “Others”, which applies the aforementioned calculation logic to a single group that comprises all FVM contracts that do not belong to any known DeFi protocol.
Starboard’s calculation logic assumes that a financing protocol consists of retail investors, called ‘stakers’, which contribute liquidity to the protocol, as well as borrowers, in this case Storage Providers, who receive liquidity. The SPs repay the loan to the protocol with interest after receiving mining block rewards from Filecoin protocol for securing and validating the Filecoin chain protocol. The interest constitutes a return of investment which is shared between the protocol and stakers; this return can vary depending on a multitude of factors, including overall growth of data and capacity on the Filecoin Network, utilization of the specific DeFi protocol and much more. Starboard’s calculation is only based on analyzing FIL transfers in the Filecoin blockchain via the Filecoin Virtual Machine. We separately measure inflow and outflow from each category with respect to the protocol’s associated smart contracts. Two key assumptions are made for this DeFi leaderboard:
We assume an account is a borrower if it is known to be a storage miner, or associated to one as the owner or worker of another miner.
We assume that borrowers and stakers are mutually exclusive, that is, an account that is not a borrower is automatically considered a staker, if they have deposited FIL into a protocol.
These assumptions may be violated in situations that involve off-chain interactions. For example, this methodology may not be able to capture borrowing or repayment in the scenario that a protocol makes an off-chain arrangement to refund an SP borrower through a separate Filecoin wallet rather than the SP’s account.
Another scenario in which these assumptions do not apply is when the protocol’s business model differs materially from that of a traditional staking pool. Transactional flow from a staking pool is protocol-centric: net flow of FIL occurs through the protocol’s contracts. However, some protocols operate on a mortgage basis by controlling the wallets of storage miners as collateral for the loan. In such a scenario, transactional flow is user-centric, and it is necessary to consider token inflow and outflow through the borrower’s accounts.
Due to the difficulty in accounting for all possible business models and payment/repayment methods, Starboard permits protocols to report staking and borrowing metrics instead of using our calculation logic, and the protocols that do so are denoted with .