On October 15th, 2020 Filecoin mainnet was launched and ChangeNOW is one of the first exchange providers to include FIL exchange on its platform. In this article, we’ll explain in detail what Filecoin is and why everyone is talking about it.
About Filecoin
The story of this crypto project started in 2017, when the Filecoin ICO was launched and raised $257 million. It came as a surprise to many, and the project team had yet to release the alpha version. Over the next three years, despite the great team and backing by prominent names in venture capital, the project raised many questions. However, the mostly quiet work went on and in October 2020, the mainnet was finally launched, so that users could enjoy the benefits of this brand new blockchain experience.
How does Filecoin work?
What was all the hype about in 2017 and why do all the press headlines are now speculating on the topic of the long-awaited Filecoin launch? To understand this, let’s go to the description of Filecoin on the main website of the project. It is described as “a decentralized storage network designed to store humanity’s most important information”.
Filecoin is a protocol that aims to enable any user to trade the free storage space on the network, while the files are shared between different hard storage devices. Simply put, it is a reverse version of torrent file distribution, only protected by the private key of the user, which is written on the blockchain.
The Filecoin protocol itself works as follows: you select the file you want to put on the network, after that, you pay a fee in FIL (native cryptocurrency) for the transaction, then your file is encrypted, split, and distributed in small segments between different nodes. To collect it back, the user needs a private key – so the control to access the files is completely in the user’s hands, like with a private crypto wallet.
Why is Filecoin in the spotlight now?
Filecoin news this October repeated the same level of excitement about it seen in 2017, and there are several reasons for this.
Firstly, the extended period of silence from the project and 3 long years before the release of the mainnet put a lot of investors on their toes. When all of this is behind, and the network is rolled out, people can finally get excited about the long-awaited release.
Secondly, Filecoin’s promise is in the field of data privacy, and this topic is becoming more relevant year after year. So it is only natural that everybody interested in participating in this network was waiting for the exact second of the project’s release to get on board.
And finally, reflecting the market excitement, a handful of the major crypto exchanges released the FIL coin for trading. The coin responded with a 118% rally and the Filecoin futures price in a few hours got to $150 million in trading volume.
What is waiting ahead?
Recently there was another ambitious project met with the same excitement – Polkadot. However, its price fluctuations were established in the coming weeks after release. It is hard to make any long term FIL price predictions at this point. At the moment Filecoin market cap is ranked in the top 30, investment and community backing of the coin are solid, and the idea itself still up to the test, but what can be said without a shadow of a doubt – we’ll hear a lot more about Filecoin this Fall.
If you want to try out this new cryptocurrency and be one of the first pioneers to experience decentralized cloud storage – you can exchange any crypto you have to Filecoin (FIL) on ChangeNOW!
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