Decentralized storage network Filecoin’s mainnet went live around 14:44 on Thursday (October 15), with the FIL token finally being traded across crypto exchanges more than three years after Filecoin completed its initial coin offering (ICO).
On 7 September 2017, Filecoin’s ICO, which had began on 10 August 2017, officially ended, raising over $205 million (and additional $52 million was raised in a presale).
The basic idea of Filecoin is that it allows users to rent out their spare storage capacity for which they get rewarded with FIL tokens. Here is how Filecoin’s blog post expressed this idea:
“The Filecoin network represents a completely new way to store and retrieve data peer-to-peer – secured by cryptographic proofs to verify data is uniquely stored and replicated over time.
“With Filecoin, anyone can participate as a storage provider, monetize their open hard drive space, and help store humanity’s most important information.
“This provides an important incentive layer for IPFS, the InterPlanetary File System – enhancing the existing web3 storage infrastructure already used by thousands of projects and developers.”
And here is how crypto exchange explained Filecoin in a tweet on October 13:
Filecoin’s mainnet launched around 14:44 UTC on Thursday (October 15) at block 148,888.
As Coindesk pointed out, the tokens distributed yesterday are all “subject to a vesting schedule, so only a very small portion of the total supply of 2 billion FIL in the Filecoin system would count as circulating.” As of 10:15 UTC on October 16, the estimated circulating supply is 15,055,155.
On Wednesday (October 14), Eric Voorhees, the CEO of ShapeShift, sent out a tweet in which he congratulated Protocol Labs, the R&D Lab that built Filecoin, and said that Filecoin is “easily one of the most professionally built, carefully-executed, and *valuable* projects that has emerged from the ICO era.”
Shortly after trading in the FIL token began yesterday, the price surged from $32.50 to $114.32, before falling to $58.87, where it it is currently (10:20 UTC on October 16).
This is what popular Bitcoin maximalist “WhalePanda” had to say about FIL’s price action:
