The Filecoin network forms a decentralized storage marketplace: where users can rent storage capacity from participants on the network, and then store or distribute files across the network.
FILECOIN technology is based on a combined "Proof of Replication" and "Proof of Space-Time" consensus mechanism. Proof of replication enables verification of file integrity while proof of space-time ensures that clients are charged only for the space they use over time.
A Filecoin Token Sale took place at the start of August 2017, with a total supply of around 1 billion tokens being created for this sale. This was one of the largest and most successful token sales to date; we reported on it here on HotCopper if you want to explore it more:
The tokens are now trading on various exchanges, including HitBTC and Bittrex . You can check this LINK for more exchange availability. At the time of writing, the price of 1 FIL token is US$4.45, which represents a considerable increase from the ICO price of exactly US$0.10 at which it began trading. This represents an approximate 14x increase in value which demonstrates the potential of holding on to initial coin offerings.
With nearly US$236 million raised through this token sale, Filecoin became one of the largest ICOs of all time. This quickly made it one of the most valuable cryptocurrencies, ranking 25th by market capitalization at the time of writing. The success of the Filecoin ICO can be attributed to a combination of factors, including the strong team backing the project itself, but also because it has been developed in conjunction by Protocol Labs and IPFS (the InterPlanetary File System) developer, Juan Benet.
IPFS is an open-source protocol designed to make the web faster, safer and more open.
It is a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open. It is a distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files; it aims to reduce publisher and user response times and limit the origin of fake news by creating a peer-to-peer web of trust, both increasing transparency and reducing dependency on the "Cloud".
It can be thought of being closely related to other decentralised file systems such as MaidSafe, Storj and Sia. However, unlike these projects that generally focus on storage or transfer capabilities for electronic information, IPFS provides an interface similar to the HTTP protocol that allows for different types of content to be hosted on the network.
The big idea behind IPFS is to make it possible to access information like websites and files in a trusted peer-to-peer fashion. The researchers involved with this project believe that cloud storage systems are dependent on centralization; they argue that a peer-to-peer protocol is much harder to censor and will allow for much more stability in the long run. However, it's important to note that clients do not have direct access to files hosted on IPFS – they use HTTP-like requests which return content to the client from any connected node.