Filecoin Fervor Gaining Momentum in China as Mainnet Nears Launch

Filecoin touts itself as a decentralized data retrieval and storage network designed to ‘store humanity’s most important information.’ The Protocol Labs-developed crypto project is finally poised to launch on mainnet three years after its $200 million ICO. The network uses InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) technology which allows users to rent unused hard drive space for storage and offer their own to host content. A great deal of hype has mounted as the project aims to be a decentralized alternative to Amazon Web Services which currently has the majority of the cloud industry market share.

Filecoin Mainnet Mania Mounting

In late September, Nasdaq published an article highlighting the project’s three-year roadmap and the ‘Space Race’ testnet that was initiated. It added that around 3.5 million native FIL tokens were used to buy and sell storage on the network and will be distributed to participants. According to the network explorer Filfox, the current network storage capacity is around 535 PiB (pebibytes), which is the binary equivalent of a Petabyte. As with Bitcoin, miners in China dominate the distribution, although Singapore is also a top runner. Over 62% of all miners taking part in the testnet were based in China according to the dashboard. According to a recent post on the Filecoin Twitter, there will be a week of talks, workshops, and panels from the web3 community to celebrate the launch. The mainnet will officially begin at epoch 148,888, which it expects to occur around Oct. 15. Just like Polkadot, Filecoin will take a phased approach to launching its mainnet.

Single digit countdown starts today- 9 DAYS until Filecoin Liftoff Week! Join the web3 Community and many other web3 influencers on October 19-23 for an entire week of exclusive content to celebrate Filecoin liftoff! 🎉 🚀 https://t.co/nfMa87QEzN pic.twitter.com/Qw0JiYviwv

— Filecoin (@Filecoin) October 10, 2020

Token Pump Inbound?

A Twitter account called Autism Capital (@AutismCapital), which has recently delved into some of DeFi’s dodgy dealings, noted that there was a huge surge in Chinese OTC demand for Filecoin:

Stay away from @Filecoin. Recent sudden ***HUGE*** surge in Chinese OTC demand. Indicative of probable Ponzi games being played. Now SBF tweets. We highly recommend staying away from this. We speculate it's not worth taking the risk. https://t.co/tpsnUb0OhG

— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) October 11, 2020

The post was in response to one by FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried who was questioning the nomenclature of its ticker. At the time of press, FIL was trading hands for $38.19 after hitting an all-time high of $44 earlier.

Crypto exchange OKEx listed Filecoin over the weekend, and analysts have already started to become suspicious, especially when these unnatural pumps follow.

But hey, $fil is like the good old 2014 pump and dumps. Huge hype, white paper over white paper, podcasts, people renting servers and whatever. The IOU
is already trading 6x ipo price. Seeing a lot of the ogs in. Sbf is on the bandwagon so you know almeda is not far behind

— Lord Ashdrake (@Lord_Ashdrake) October 11, 2020

Industry analyst Mike Dudas added;

“It’s wild that @Filecoin $FIL currently has a higher inflation-adjusted market cap than $ETH.”

As with many newly-hyped crypto tokens, there is often an initial pump followed by a dump — Polkadot (DOT) is a good example of this.