Quickly understand the top project Filecoin, just read this article

Countdown to testnet launch: 76 days

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On Friday, September 20, an explosive news brought the industry enthusiasm brought by the 5th Shanghai International Blockchain Week (9/14-9/18) to a new climax: Coinbase, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange and the first cryptocurrency exchange in the United States to hold a formal license, listed 17 new assets and planned to support their listing, including the world's top project - Filecoin.

Five days later, at the early morning of September 25th, Beijing time, Filecoin officially announced the launch schedule of its project to the entire network: the test network will be launched on December 11, 2019, and the main network will be launched in the first quarter of 2020. Instantly, all participants in the entire Filecoin ecosystem were excited and passionate. The community was in a very excited state for a whole day. Also appearing in this asset list are the super cross-chain project Polkadot, which appeared at this International Blockchain Week, and my country's well-known layered architecture smart contract platform project Nervos.

Many friends who don’t know much about the Filecoin project can’t help but ask: What kind of blockchain project is Filecoin?

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To introduce Filecoin, we must first talk about IPFS.

IPFS (Interplanetary File System) is a new media distribution protocol that is comparable to http (addressed by IP address). It supports the creation of fully distributed applications through content and identity addressing, making the transmission network faster, safer and more open. IPFS was launched in May 2015 and has been running stably for more than 4 years. So far, tens of billions of data have been stored on it, and hundreds of applications have been developed based on IPFS. Filecoin is the incentive layer of IPFS and its only official token, with the token symbol FIL (just like Bitcoin's token symbol BTC).

Filecoin is a decentralized storage network that transforms cloud storage into an algorithmic market. Miners "mine" FIL tokens by providing data storage and data retrieval, and users need to pay FIL to allow miners to provide data storage, distribution, and retrieval. Filecoin has updated five major versions since its code was open sourced on February 14, 2019 (Valentine's Day), and will be launched on the mainnet in the first quarter of 2020. Filecoin and IPFS are a pair of complementary protocols that jointly solve the transmission, location, and storage of data. Their development team comes from the same company - Protocol Labs.

The industry consensus is that exchanges have always been the clearest track for business models, but they are also facing the most intense and fierce competition. The continuous mining of high-quality currencies with vitality will always be the lifeline for them to maintain their combat effectiveness. As the top of the food chain in the blockchain industry, the values ​​of an excellent exchange are likely to represent the future development direction of the industry. This time, Coinbase included Filecoin in the listing list, which undoubtedly reflects some of its thoughts on the future direction of blockchain.

In addition, Fred Ehrsam, the co-founder of Coinbase and a former Goldman Sachs trader, is also a personal investor in Protocol Labs. Moreover, Coinbase has also invested in two application projects, Textile (a permanent photo storage wallet based on IPFS: Textile | Returning data to users) and Pinata (an analysis of Pinata will also be released this week, so keep an eye on Interstellar Vision). All these arrangements are enough to show their emphasis on IPFS and Filecoin.

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Why does Coinbase have a special liking for IPFS/Filecoin? 1. IPFS/Filecoin Vision - Realizing Hard Drive Sharing Bitcoin, the representative of blockchain 1.0. Bitcoin mainly imitates the model of gold. It is a decentralized encrypted digital currency fully supported by the basic Internet protocols and cryptographic technology. It has formed a digital currency value system that is different from the legal currency system and can be exchanged with legal currency.

Bitcoin has the functions of payment and circulation, laying the foundation for the entire blockchain world and is a revolutionary practice of blockchain technology in the financial field. Ethereum is the representative of blockchain 2.0. Ethereum's innovation in the development and application of smart contracts has greatly shortened the distance between blockchain technology and the commercial society, and solved the most important "trust problem" in transactions with mathematics and code. The rapid rise in the price of Ethereum and the craze of 1co are the most direct manifestations of the value logic behind it.

If blockchain 1.0 and 2.0 are just the combination of blockchain technology and the financial field, then the real advent of the blockchain 3.0 era will be triggered by the combination of blockchain technology and practical applications, and Filecoin may become a typical representative. According to Huawei's "Global Industry Outlook GIV", the total amount of global data will surge more than five times in just seven years, from 32.5ZB in 2018 to 180ZB in 2025. However, in the eyes of many analysts, 5 times is a very conservative estimate.

In 2017, the world generated more data than humans have in the past 5,000 years. With the rapid popularization of 5G, the speed of generating new data will certainly increase in the future. This data is currently mainly stored in data centers around the world. However, while companies continue to build data centers, nearly half of the hard disk storage space in the world is idle. For example, you and I actually have some idle storage space in our computers, which is not being used. Filecoin uses blockchain technology to activate the idle bandwidth and hard disks around the world. People who are willing to share hard disk space (miners) can earn tokens FIL, and those who need to store files have to pay FIL.

FIL can be placed in an electronic wallet to pay for storage services in the future, or it can be exchanged for other cryptocurrencies or legal tender at an exchange. The concept of Filecoin's shared hard drive is very similar to Airbnb's shared rooms, both of which put idle resources on the network for people in need to use, and people who share resources can earn rent. IPFS makes the network faster, safer, and more open. Filecoin can prevent stored data from being deleted at will like Baidu Netdisk, while greatly reducing storage costs. Therefore, IPFS/Filecoin evangelist Dong Tianyi said that Filecoin is the first blockchain project that can be implemented and closely integrated with the real economy after Bitcoin and Ethereum.

2. How powerful is the founding team of IPFS/Filecon?

Every great blockchain project founder is almost a god-like existence. Juan is to IPFS/FILecoin as Satoshi Nakamoto is to Bitcoin and Vitalik is to Ethereum.

Juan Benet graduated from the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University with a bachelor's, master's and doctorate. Stanford University, located near the world-renowned high-tech park Silicon Valley, is a world-renowned research university and ranks second in the world in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) and QS World University Rankings.

Brief introduction of the three team members:

Marvin Ammori is General Counsel of Protocol Labs and a research fellow at Stanford Law School.

A graduate of the University of Michigan, he also holds a JD from Harvard Law School. In 2007, while serving as general counsel for the nonprofit advocacy organization Free Press, he brought the Comcast-BitTorrent case, the first net neutrality enforcement case in the United States. As a lawyer, Ammori has advised companies such as Google and Apple on net neutrality, copyright, and encryption.

Colin Evran graduated from Stanford University and has served as a strategic consultant for Protocol Labs and a strategic analyst for BizDev since July 2017. He founded Yard Club from 2013 to 2017 and it was acquired by Caterpillar.

Jesseclay Burgy graduated from Stanford University with a degree in computer engineering. As a core member of the early Protocol Labs team, Jesseclay started working on the project from IPFS. Recently, he has mainly contributed to the security of Filecoin's library module and transaction data circulation. He was a software development engineer at American Express.

The success of an open source blockchain project cannot rely on just a few people. The open source community often brings together a large number of first-class code contributors. Currently, there are more than 50 direct code contributors to the Filecoin project on Github. 3. What are the backgrounds of the IPFS/Filecon funding team?

Institutional representatives: World-renowned university: Stanford University (Juan's alma mater) The world's top investment institution: Sequoia Capital New York financial giant focusing on blockchain and digital currency investment: Digital Currency Group /DCG Group The most valuable venture capital incubator ranked by Forbes: Y Combinator Silicon Valley's hottest venture capital company: Andreessen Horowitz New York venture capital with $1 billion in assets: Union Square Ventures

Personal Representative:

Naval Ravikant, founder of AngelList, an American equity crowdfunding platform

Semil Shah, founder of Haystack Fund

Gyft.com Founder & CEO: Vinodan Lingham

Fred Ehrsam, former Goldman Sachs trader and co-founder of Coinbase

Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype and founder of the British restaurant brand Chilango

Figma co-founder & CEO, Silicon Valley legendary math genius: Dylan Field

Rumor has it that the combined strength of these investors is enough to buy half of the earth.

4. Filecoin Project Introduction

If you are an old-timer in the cryptocurrency circle, you must know that Filecon set a fundraising record of 257 million US dollars in about a month in the summer of 2017.

Total FIL: 2 billion

Miners: 70%, 1.4 billion

Protocol Labs: 15%, 300 million

Investors: 10% (public offering + private offering), 200 million

Filecoin Foundation: 5%, 100 million

Participation qualifications: US qualified investor identity certification (using the same process as IPO to ensure legitimacy) ICO share: 10% (200 million)

Total ICO amount: $257 million

Private placement cost: $0.75/FIL (the price is the same for all private placements)

Distribution period and discount: 1 year - 3 years, discount 0 - 30% (minimum distribution period is one year)

Number of participants: About 150 people

Private placement amount: Approximately $52 million

Public offering cost range: 1 - 5 USD

Distribution period and discounts: 6 months (0%), 1 year (7.5%), 2 years (15%), 3 years (20%)

Public offering amount: US$205 million

Number of participants: 2100+ 5.

Why is Filecoin mining so popular?

Token distribution details:

Start time: The time starts from the launch of Filecoin mainnet.

For example: 6-month distribution period, distribution will be completed within 6 months after the mainnet is launched

ICO investors: 1 year minimum distribution period (private offering), 6 months minimum distribution period (public offering)

Protocol Labs: 6 years, linear release

Filecoin Foundation: 6 years, linear release

Miners: About half will be distributed in 6 years

It is not difficult to find that 70% of Filecoin can only be obtained through mining after the mainnet is launched, and the lock-up period of the 30% that has been issued ranges from 6 months to 6 years, which means that there is very little FIL circulating in the market in a short period of time. Storage miners need to pledge a part of FIL tokens to promise that their hard drives are reliable and always online. Customers have to pay FIL to enjoy the service of file storage. The more people participate, the more FIL needs to be pledged and traded. In the early stage, the circulation of Fil is very small, so the price will not be seriously diluted. If you want to know more details about the Filecoin project, reply "F" in the background to check the Filecoin white paper.

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However, the Filecoin project is not perfect. Due to its complex economic model and difficult technical implementation, the team experienced project delays after the project was launched.

Many domestic Filecoin ecological teams are unable to sustain the mainnet launch due to insufficient blood-making capabilities, so they have begun to work on similar projects. What's worse, some of them are doing cx and zjp business under the guise of selling mining machines, extending their black hands to retail investors who lack knowledge and risk awareness, making the industry, which is already in its early stages, even more chaotic.

But there is no absolutely perfect project. In addition to Coinbase Exchange, which has long been optimistic about Filecoin, many domestic exchanges have also launched FIL futures in advance. IPFS/Filecoin uses blockchain technology to complete the ingenious design of token incentives and shared storage resources, attracting many fans to follow and pay close attention. Every technological innovation hides huge industry dividends. The Filecoin team, which is immersed in technological development, gives us the courage and confidence to calm down.