Official postponement has become a routine, can we participate in Filecoin futures?

This article was originally written by Carl from IPFS Force Zone

“The delay in the launch of Filecoin’s mainnet is not news anymore,” a member of the Filecoin community joked, revealing his frustration between the lines.

It was July 15th, and Filecoin officially announced that the launch date of the space race would be postponed from July 20th to August 3rd. The space race cycle is fixed at 3 weeks, and as a result, the mainnet launch window had to be adjusted.

According to the latest official announcement, the launch time of the space race will be August 12 at the latest, which mainly depends on whether more than 50% of the miners participating in the calibration period network can achieve a transaction success rate of more than 75%. Judging from the current data of the calibration period network dashboard, there is still a certain distance from the official expectations. If the final result still does not meet the official expectations, it is not impossible to postpone it.

The official purpose of Filecoin is actually very simple, which is to hope that more large miners will participate in the test to ensure that the Filecoin mainnet can run stably when it goes online. If you understand the good intentions of the official, you will also understand why Filecoin has been adjusted more and more frequently in the near future.

Cryptocurrency investors have always favored mining, but the uncertainty of the launch time of the Filecoin mainnet has made them hesitate. As the Filecoin market becomes more and more popular, many investors have turned their attention to FIL futures launched on cryptocurrency exchanges.

Indeed, having missed the private placement of Filecoin in 2017, ordinary investors can now only participate in Filecoin investment through mining and futures. However, are FIL futures on the exchange reliable?

Futures are completely different from spot. Futures can be understood as a certificate, which can be exchanged for real spot through a specific institution at a certain time in the future.

Because the Filecoin mainnet has not yet been launched, there is actually no real FIL circulating in the market. In order to meet the investment needs in the market, the exchange issued FIL futures with the platform as endorsement, aiming to attract more traffic. Currently, FIL futures are divided into three categories: FIL6, FIL12, and FIL36. The number behind it refers to the delivery period in months. For example, if you buy 10 FIL6, then the exchange needs to exchange the FIL futures for real FIL on the Filecoin network and give it to investors within 6 months after the mainnet is launched.

According to the data on Feixiaohao, there are already dozens of exchanges that have launched FIL in the market, including Biying, Lbank, Gate.io and other exchanges that are familiar to cryptocurrency investors.

(Data from Gate.io)

But here comes a question, why are the FIL prices of major exchanges different? Even exchanges that offer the same FIL6 have price differences of several times?

Here, we need to first clarify two characteristics of FIL futures:

• FIL futures are not real FIL, but a kind of certificate;

• The certificate only corresponds to the trading platform that issued it.

This means that although they are both FIL futures, they all have different labels. The FIL6 you buy on Gate.io can only be exchanged by Gate.io after the mainnet is launched, and cannot be exchanged on other exchanges. Since the FIL futures on various exchanges cannot circulate freely and the depth of buy and sell orders varies, there is a certain price difference.

Since the FIL futures prices of various exchanges are different, can we see which trading platform has the lowest FIL futures price and make a timely move to increase future potential returns? We also need to be alert to risks.

The underlying logic of FIL futures is that when investors buy FIL futures from an exchange, they are actually betting against the exchange. If the price of Filecoin is higher than it is now after the mainnet goes online, then the investors will make money, and the exchange will bear the profit. In other words, when FIL futures are delivered, the investor's profit is the exchange's loss, and vice versa.

This brings certain potential risks. After all, the blockchain industry is still in its early stages of development and lacks a clear and mature regulatory system. The most important risk lies in whether the exchange can realize the acceptance of futures.

Among the trading platforms that have launched futures, except for a few exchanges such as LBank and Gate.io that participated in the Filecoin private placement, most other exchanges did not participate in the private placement. In addition, whether the trading platform has sufficient FIL "stock" and the specific futures delivery details are not clearly disclosed. The initiative is completely in the hands of the exchange, which is also a potential risk for investors.

In summary, unlike the value investment advocated by Buffett, FIL futures are more like a means of speculation. Even though the mainnet launch time has not yet been finalized, the "small step" extension means that Filecoin's launch has entered the final countdown stage. Perhaps then, it will be a better time to invest.