Hong Kong, China -- (ReleaseWire) -- 11/17/2020 --Introduction: The current situation of Filecoin is not optimistic. Negative news emerges endlessly. There are many hype about the application of IPFS. Whether multiple futures products on the market can solve the status quo of Filecoin, and how IPFS is going in the future, this article will provide an in-depth interpretation from a third-party perspective!
On October 15th, with the launch of Filecoin's mainnet, Filecoin, which has been in preparation for three years, finally opened its final chapter! However, the Filecoin launched on the mainnet did not meet the desired expectations, and even various negative events continued one after another. Therefore, what is the future of Filecoin? We have an in-depth interpretation of the current status of Filecoin and its underlying protocol IPFS from an objective perspective.
The application situation of IPFS
Based on its decentralized characteristics, IPFS received huge financial investment at the beginning of the project. In addition to the IPFS project Bole YCombinator, it also includes Sequoia Capital, Winklevoss Brothers, Digital Currency Group, Stanford University, Anderson Horowitz Fund, FC Emerging Network Equity Crowdfunding Institution, Union Square Ventures USV etc., with a total financing of more than 257 million US dollars! However, these investments are to obtain equity in the parent company, and Filecoin did not give the investors any token commitments. It was not until August this year that IPFS Labs compromised and promised to give these shareholders in the form of tokens.
IPFS, which is born with gold, is also fully blooming in terms of real market applications. First, let's look at the application of search engines.
Firefox product manager Mike Conca published an article on Mozilla's official website stating that browser extension applications support distributed protocols including IPFS, that is, support for the "ipfs://" protocol.
Google Chrome is also adding a plug-in IPFS Companion to the extended application to help users better run and manage their own nodes locally, and view the resource information of IPFS nodes at any time.
Opera browser has cooperated with IPFS for a long time. Its Android version of Opera browser has launched IPFS support and developed encrypted wallet in the browser. There are Android, iOS and desktop versions.
In addition to the three major engine browsers, there are also IPSE and Poseidon search engines. These two search engines are both search engines based on the IPFS network and mainly serve for blockchain projects.
The second is file transfer applications. IPFS already has some application carriers, including Partyshare, Pinata and IPWB. For example, Partyshare is an open source file sharing application built on the peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol IPFS, which allows users to share files using IPFS.
In community and e-commerce applications, applications like Indorse, Steepshot, Peepeth, Origin, Open Bazaar, etc. have also appeared. All of the above applications use the IPFS protocol!
On the whole, although the total number of IPFS related applications has reached nearly one hundred, the application of IPFS on the three mainstream engines is only in the form of a plug-in, and file transfer is only to improve the storage needs of IPFS. Peripheral applications are also on some related blockchain platforms, and there is no large-scale implementation.
IPFS is moving towards a path of full coverage in the blockchain application industry. Compared with the reports that the media claimed to replace HTTP and subvert the entire Internet when IPFS was first born, IPFS has not been possible to complete in recent years or more than a decade, and it is even more difficult than HTTP. The most prominent ability of IPFS is its decentralized storage capacity in a specific range. Blockchain is only a portrayal of database technology. For a behemoth like HTTP, IPFS currently does not have any practical application capabilities to shake it. Looking at it this way, IPFS has a long way to go.
Filecoin
The association between Filecoin and IPFS is simple. Filecoin is the incentive layer on the IPFS protocol. To put it another way: IPFS is not a blockchain, nor a certain token, but an Internet protocol. Filecoin is the IPFS protocol token, a payment transaction token for distributed storage nodes under the IPFS protocol. Its purpose is to reflect the financial value of IPFS in the form of tokens for market circulation and transactions.
Filecoin's blocks run on a new type of proof mechanism called "space-time proof", and its blocks will be mined by miners who store data. The Filecoin protocol does not rely on a network consisting of a single coordinated and independent storage provider to provide data storage and retrieval services, among which:
(1) The user pays for data storage and retrieval,
(2) Storage miners earn tokens by providing storage space,
(3) Search for miners to provide data services to earn tokens.
Filecoin turns cloud storage into an algorithmic market. This algorithm market is based on a local protocol, Filecoin (FIL), where miners can obtain Filecoin (FIL) by providing storage to customers.
In turn, customers spend Filecoin to hire miners to store or distribute data. Like Bitcoin, Filecoin miners compete to mine blocks for considerable rewards, but Filecoin's mining power is proportional to effective storage, that is, it directly provides customers with useful services.
On Filecoin conspiracy theory
This wave of disputes among miners has not yet settled, and Filecoin's price performance in the secondary market has also plummeted. The data website shows that the current price of FIL is 24.3 US dollars, which is too far away from the price of around 200 US dollars when it was launched.
Within a few days of the mainnet launch, 1.5 million FIL large tokens were transferred from an unknown address, and 800,000 FIL was transferred to Huobi Exchange. According to Filecoin's unlocking plan, early investors, officials and miners should unlock only 500,000 coins on the first day. With the official promise that FIL tokens will not be sold in the early days, where do these tokens come from? Can't help but smell the conspiracy theory!
In response, Filecoin members gave an official response, calling this unknown account an official account. The transfer of these FIL tokens is mainly to ensure market stability. The tokens are bought and sold on exchanges to provide market liquidity, stabilize prices, and correct imbalanced incentives for miners. The transfer of these tokens is not a FIL sale by Protocol Labs. The market-making plan is for the benefit of the community to ensure that there is liquidity in the market at the beginning and maintain currency prices.
On October 20th, another 30,000 FIL was transferred from an unknown address. As of the date of publication, the official team has transferred 909,000 FIL. If calculated on the basis of the price of FIL at 170 dollars when it was launched, the total value is more than 150 million dollars. Even if the current market price is more than 20 dollars, the amount of this token is more than 20 million dollars.
Large amounts of FIL flow into the market, and retail investors are the biggest losers in the secondary market. The plunge in the price of FIL has a lot to do with the fact that the test coin can be bought and sold as the mainnet coin. According to Filecoin's official statement before, all sectors in the space race zone 1 and 2 will be migrated to the main network, and the pledge of these sectors and the block rewards obtained will also be migrated to the main network. The encapsulated effective computing power, pledged FIL and mined FIL test coins will be migrated to the main network in a certain proportion.
However, after the mainnet went live, the flow of test coins was directly transferred to exchanges for trading, which also allowed the miners who dominated the space race to gain a lot of FIL. Some people are happy with some tragedies. While those who hold FIL are rejoicing in absenteeism, it is a disaster for those who do not have FIL and the retail investors in the secondary market!
In response to this incident, Filecoin official members explained that: the test coin can be directly used as the main net coin is a special design, not a "Bug". This is to ensure the security of the network. The miners sold tens of millions of FIL immediately after the mainnet went live, which was "seriously exaggerated", and the actual amount sold was only 1/10 to 1/100 of the number mentioned in the report. Regardless of the amount of data, it is undeniable that the selling behavior of these miners is one of the factors that contributed to the plunge in FIL prices. And from the official explanation, it is obvious that it is to provide shelter for these absenteeism, and the so-called absenteeism is very likely to be an official black-box operation.
Word-of-mouth and price have both encountered Waterloo. Juan Benet sent dozens of Twitter to refute rumors and respond, but the fact that Filecoin is going high and low cannot be concealed. The only incentive layer, Filecoin, is in a deep development dilemma and it is difficult to survive. This makes the future path of trying to subvert the entire Internet application layer protocol standard IPFS again full of variables.
QFIL and FIL futures products
Back to the secondary trading market, FIL's market conditions plummeted. Excluding mining income, FIL's acquisition channels are more important in the early stage from exchanges. Before FIL is officially launched, FIL's futures products have always been the highlight.
Let's take a look first, what are the futures products in the market?
FIL6: 6-month FIL futures products, the same as FIL mining 180 antenna release cycle;
FIL12: 12-month FIL futures product; FIL36: 36-month FIL futures product, the number of periods is the delivery time.
Based on the popularity of Filecoin, many exchanges have launched FIL futures in the early stage.
Among them, the QFIL product launched by QuickCash (QC issuer) and first released on the ZB.com platform has been liked by many users. Because QFIL supports payment within 15-30 days after FIL goes online, it is faster than many 6-month/12-month futures. In addition, QFIL is an ERC20 token and supports DeFi mining. At present, ZB.com has also supported depositing QFIL and mining QC (1:1 stablecoin against offshore CNY), and the price of QFIL, which supports multiple game modes, has surpassed FIL once. As of press time (11:39 am on October 24), QFIL is quoted at 24.1USDT and FIL is at 23.43USDT.
Conclusion
Futures products like QFIL can solve the liquidity problem of FIL to a certain extent and also inject new market momentum into the development of FIL.
As far as the status quo of Filecoin is concerned, the future of Filecoin requires the efforts of various aspects of the currency circle. Filecoin bears the expectations of too many investors, but blindly pursuing investment returns will only help it. Only by continuously improving its own mechanism and strengthening its application can IPFS go further and further.
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