Filecoin to activate Solstice upgrade on Oct. 19 as Upbit suspends FIL transfers

The Filecoin (FIL) network will activate an upgrade called "Solstice" on the night of Oct. 19. According to Lotus v1.37.0, released on Oct. 6 by the team behind the Lotus node software, the upgrade takes effect at mainnet epoch 6,470,279, or 9:59:30 p.m. KST on Oct. 19. South Korean exchange Upbit said in a notice on Oct. 12 that it will suspend FIL deposits and withdrawals from 8 p.m. KST on Oct. 19 for the upgrade.

The Lotus team designated the release as mandatory. Node operators and storage providers, the miners who rent out storage space, must switch to v1.37.0 before the upgrade epoch. A pre-migration runs once 120 epochs before the upgrade; in a Sept. 18 test using mainnet data, the pre-migration and the migration itself each took a little over a minute. The upgrade went live on the testnet first on Sept. 28, and the developers set the mainnet timing after confirming the result.

Vetting of "useful data" comes to an end

At the core of the upgrade is FIP-0118. On Filecoin, the larger a miner's "quality-adjusted power" (QAP), a weighting applied to its storage capacity, the greater its chance of winning block rewards. Until now, only sectors (units of storage) recognized as holding real client data received a 10x weighting through the "Fil+" (Filecoin Plus) program. That eligibility is called "DataCap."

After the upgrade, all minting and allocation of DataCap stops. Instead, every sector onboarded from that point receives a 10x weighting regardless of what it stores, and existing sectors are given a path to upgrade to 10x. The formula for the collateral miners must post (the initial pledge) is unchanged. The proposal said human review of data slowed the onboarding of new clients and left room for abuse through fake demand. It also states that about 83% of current sectors already have DataCap. The proposal said paid services such as the recently launched "Filecoin Onchain Cloud" cannot be supported by the current reward structure, and argued that the network needs to move from a phase of adding storage capacity to one of attracting paying customers.

Block rewards split three ways

Newly issued block rewards will now be divided into a share for the miner that produces the block (the consensus stream), a share for "Service Orchestrators" tasked with growing demand for storage services (the service stream), and a share that is burned. Transaction fees (gas) continue to go in full to the miner, as they do today.

The miner share starts at 95% and falls to 50% over about nine quarters (two years and three months). The service share starts at 5%, reaches 10% when the first quarter ends, and after that rises by 5 percentage points per quarter only if volume settled through Filecoin Pay, the network's payment service, exceeds a target. The first target is $3,500 per quarter, and it grows 2.7-fold with each step, reaching about $3.66 million at the final step. Whatever part of the reduction in the miner share is not filled by the service share is burned. There is no burn share in the first quarter. Only one Orchestrator will be registered at first, and a separate governance body decides additions and removals. The split is managed by a new "Stream Weights" contract, and any change takes effect only after a seven-day waiting period. The proposal said this approach of dividing a fixed issuance into several streams was inspired by the subnet reward model of Bittensor (TAO).

Upbit halts deposits and withdrawals from 8 p.m. on Oct. 19

Upbit said it will suspend FIL deposits and withdrawals from 8 p.m. KST on Oct. 19 until the network is confirmed stable, while trading will continue. It advised users to leave enough time when depositing, as deposits made just before the suspension may not be credited on time. Upbit also announced the same day that it will suspend IoTeX (IOTX) deposits and withdrawals from 9 a.m. KST on Oct. 19 for a hard fork.

At around 12:30 p.m. KST on Oct. 12, FIL traded at 1,657 won on Upbit and 1,641 won on Bithumb. On Binance it traded at $1.228, up more than 12% from 24 hours earlier. The Upbit price was about 0.6% higher than the Binance price converted to won, a gap known as the kimchi premium. Upbit's FIL price hit a 52-week low of 862 won on Aug. 18, and its 52-week high was 5,900 won on Nov. 7, 2025. At the same time, the funding rate on Binance's FIL perpetual futures was 0.01%, Binance's default level.