Filecoin mainnet pre-production gives rise to the "no-coin, but market" bubble

Author: Kyle

Editor | Wen Dao

The second phase of the Filecoin testnet has been going on for 12 days. The Filecoin mainnet, which has been delayed many times, has entered the " due date " , and the latest time given by the official is August .

During the test, Filecoin released a miner incentive plan, where miners participating in the test can compete with real data, packaged transaction volume, etc. to share a total of 4 million Filecoin tokens FIL. The official hopes to fully test the network in this way and clear the way for the official launch of the main network.

At the same time, FIL has attracted much attention from the secondary market. 38 exchanges including BiKi and LBank have launched FIL futures. In the past week, the price of FIL, which has no currency but a market, has risen by more than 24%. With the dual stimulation of sharing rewards and the secondary market, more than 9,800 nodes have participated in the second phase of the test network.

The outside world has different views on the prospects of Filecoin. Some people believe that with the growth and application of its decentralized storage network, FIL will become a very valuable "hard currency" and will set off a new trend in mining; but Jiang Zhuoer, founder of the Litecoin Mining Pool, expressed his pessimism about Filecoin, citing its "poor performance" and even "not enough to store small movies."

Every hot project in the cryptocurrency world always starts with a bubble. Similarly, when the application value of Filecoin is still to be verified, the hype bubble came first, and the old saying "investment is risky" still needs to be kept in mind.

The highly anticipated decentralized storage project Filecoin has entered the countdown to its mainnet launch. Angie Maguire, a Filecoin business developer, revealed that Filecoin's mainnet will be launched this summer, and the project's public roadmap shows that Filecoin's mainnet is expected to be launched in the window period from July 20 to August 20.

On July 1, according to data from the Coincodecap website, among more than 200 well-known cryptocurrencies, Filecoin ranked first in code submission activity on GitHub in the past week, followed by Libra, which was developed by Facebook, and Ethereum, which has been busy upgrading to 2.0.

Filecoin ranks first in code submission activity in the past week

After several delays in the mainnet launch, Filecoin has finally made substantial progress. In the past two months, Filecoin has made frequent moves, attracting a lot of market attention.

On June 10, Filecoin launched the testnet rewards program, inviting miners from all over the world to compete for a total of 4 million Filecoin tokens. According to Filecoin, the testnet rewards program is a collaborative competition in which miners will compete with each other to provide as much storage capacity as possible for the network to receive rewards and to stress test the testnet.

The latest news shows that this miner competition will officially start on July 20 and will last for three weeks. The dimensions of the miner competition will be upgraded to real data, packaging of multiple transactions, and fast retrieval. After the competition, a total of 4 million Filecoin tokens FIL rewards will be released linearly within 6 months after the mainnet is launched.

Earlier on May 15, the second phase of the Filecoin testnet was launched. The main contents of the test included two interoperable implementations, security proofs (WinningPoSt and WindowPoSt), distributed random beacon network Drand, encrypted economic structure, new document URL, security review, etc.

However, this test network had a bad start. After it went online, miners reported that someone used a bug to speed up the mining, resulting in unfair mining. Then the test network stopped producing blocks, and the official website showed no data. Until June 19, the second phase of the Filecoin test network was reopened. The underlying code of this test network is closest to the main network. The purpose of the test is to evaluate Filecoin before launching the main network and solve possible problems. It is reported that this time, a total of more than 9,800 nodes in the entire network participated in the test.

On July 1, the Filecoin test network showed that the network block height exceeded 42510, the total network computing power reached 13.71PB, and the average block time was 25 seconds. The smooth operation of the test network has added a lot of confidence to those who expect Filecoin to be launched as scheduled. As the most important group supporting the operation of the network, global miners are also actively preparing for the battle.

Huake Shanyun, a cloud node storage service provider, has been following up and participating in the network testing of Filecoin. Huake Shanyun said that the second phase test network is the real test network that the outside world has been waiting for for a long time. For this reason, the company has increased its investment in mining equipment and optimized the performance of mining machines while participating in the test.

At present, the top three nodes in the Filecoin test network computing power ranking are Spacetime Cloud, Xianhe System and 1475 Tianru, with computing powers of 4.803PB, 4.58PB and 952.969TB respectively. The computing power of the three nodes accounts for nearly 80% of the entire network, and the test network presents a situation of centralized computing power.

Since the miner competition period has not officially begun, the temporary computing power ranking and overall situation are only of reference value. It is foreseeable that as the miner competition period approaches, the Filecoin test network computing power will further increase, and whether the computing power can be dispersed will also be available for external evaluation at that time.

Andy, co-founder of 1475, believes that the mining track surrounding Filecoin is still in the development stage. In the future, the division of labor will become increasingly clear, and there will be professional mining machine manufacturers, operation and maintenance service providers, mining pools and cloud computing service providers.

As Filecoin enters the "pre-production period", the secondary market has also become agitated. At least 38 exchanges, including BiKi, LBank, and Gate.io, have listed FIL. In addition, Coinbase and Gemini Exchange have also stated that they will list FIL.

In fact, in Filecoin, all FILs are written into the genesis block, and need to be released in a decentralized manner after the mainnet is launched. In other words, FIL does not exist before the mainnet is launched. At present, the online behavior of exchanges is actually to take advantage of the popularity, and what is listed is only FIL futures, which cannot be charged or withdrawn. Only after FIL is produced, can there be currency to redeem.

According to Feixiaohao data, with the launch of the second phase of Filecoin testnet and the release of the miner competition, the price of FIL has soared. In the past week, FIL has risen rapidly from $10.39 to $12.93, an increase of 24%. On BiKi, the price of FIL has been rising steadily, once exceeding $20.

FIL breaks through $20 on BiKi

As the incentive layer of the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), Filecoin has been highly anticipated by the cryptocurrency community since its launch. In September 2017, Filecoin was publicly funded at a price of $5 and raised $257 million in just 30 minutes, becoming the blockchain project with the highest fundraising amount at the time, surpassing Tezos and EOS.

Since participation in public offerings requires the identification of qualified investors in the United States, this excludes many retail investors who want to invest. Therefore, there are not many early investors in FIL, and the scarcity of FIL in circulation has become the reason why FIL is so popular.

Filecoin, which relies on the Interstellar File System (IPFS) as its incentive layer, focuses on cloud storage services from the application level. Filecoin supporters believe that when the application value of the project is effectively verified, a large number of cloud storage service providers will use Filecoin, and FIL will become a "hard currency" by then, and the increase in demand will bring value growth; in addition, due to Filecoin's mortgage mechanism, after the main network is launched, miners need to purchase FIL as a mortgage in order to participate in mining, which will reduce the market circulation of FIL and drive up the price of the currency.

Compared with the above optimistic voices, Jiang Zhuoer, the founder of the Litecoin Mining Pool, poured cold water on Filecoin. On May 27, Jiang Zhuoer said on Weibo that after evaluation, the performance of Filecoin is very poor at present, "not enough to store small movies", and the economic model is wrong. Miners rely on some GPU computing instead of storage to get rewards. "Therefore, we have no plan to participate in Filecoin mining." He believes that the current Filecoin mining machines are basically leeks pits, and it is necessary to participate with caution.

Before the launch of the Filecoin mainnet, whether it can be applied as envisioned remains to be verified. After all, IPFS, which is closely related to it, has not yet reached the stage of full network popularization. Some people in the mining circle who are on the sidelines remind that being too eager and enthusiastic about Filecoin may cause miners and mining machine investors to ignore the risks behind it, "such as fake mining machines." He also specifically reminds investors in the secondary market that "the current price of FIL is irrational and the bubble is huge. Be careful not to be drowned."