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Filecoin, the decentralized information storage project has finally launched its mainnet at block 148,888. The project which raised a little over $250 million in 2017 has finally launched its mainnet.
The launch comes three years after Filecoin’s Initial Coin Offering, and at that point in time, it was considered as one of the largest token sales that year. The process surrounding the Filecoin launch has been marked with numerous delays as well as the very recent investor uprising against Protocol Labs which is the network’s parent company.
Filecoin -a great alternative to conventional Cloud storage
Filecoin is considered as the most-awaited project back then when ICO took an infamous turn. The project has been designed in a manner that focuses on decentralized storage with substantial funding of $257 million with support from the hugely active Chinese crypto community. The platform that is built atop of the InterPlanetary File system (IPFS) is also meant to let users buy and sell unused storage using the network’s native cryptocurrency, filecoin (FIL). Users can hire miners to store or distribute data. In the process, miners can earn rewards also for completing their requests.
The network also aims to create an altogether new decentralized option to the usual cloud storage that many organizations in the crypto world are dependent on. Its main idea talks about making data censorship-resistant and the integrity of the data is checked automatically. Anyone can create data and nobody is in a position to request the removal of your file. Given that its circulating supply stands at low levels, Filecoin’s market cap stands at a little over $2 billion which is purely not sustainable.
Space Race
The team at Filecoin has announced its multi-phased plan to launch on mainnet in late September starting with a ‘pre-liftoff phase’. In the phase, the users get time to prepare their systems. The Filecoin platform had also hosted a testnet competition called Space Race which was incentivized. More than 500 miners onboarded over 325 pebibytes of storage capacity marking the successful result of the event. About the performance and the overall impact of the competition, the team excitedly said that it is equivalent of having:
“enough space for 90 million 1080p movies, 1,400 full copies of Wikipedia, or 7 times the entire written works of mankind (in all languages) from the beginning of recorded history to the present day.”
Social media especially Twitter has always been a warm recipient of great projects. Following this announcement, crypto community members welcomed the project. Erik Voorhees welcomed the project.
Source: Twitter
Gemini and Kraken exchanges had already announced the trading pairs much ahead of its mainnet release. This could be a positive sign for Filecoin as it signals confidence in the performance. Coinbase also has supposedly offered custody support for FIL. On some of the platforms, the price of FIL has gone to over $200. In its ICO Filecoin had sold 200 million tokens but only a minor proportion of it will be leaked to the open market because most of them are vested.