The global economy is stepping towards a digital ecosystem. From transferring the money to your friend to investing for retirement, everything is moving towards paperless.
With the advancement of technology, cryptocurrency has become a popular digital currency that is secured by “cryptography”. No bank, institution or other third party is involved while performing transactions.
Since cryptocurrencies are not issued by the bank or government, people are showing interest while investing the digital currency. Also, the field has expanded dramatically. Bitcoin and Etheruem are trendsetters. Apart from these digital currencies, Filecoin is another popular type of cryptocurrency.
Have you ever heard about Filecoin? If your answer is No. This article is just for you.
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What is Filecoin (FIL)?
Filecoin is the P2P network that stores user files to ensure security. This decentralized storage system’s goal is to store and secure user’s sensitive information. Users need to pay while storing their personal data on Filecoin storage miners.
“Storage Miners” are computers that are responsible for storing the user’s files. Also, proving the user’s that their files are stored in a secure way.
If you’re looking to save personal information, a storage miner could be a great choice. Keep a note, you need to pay for storing your files. Also, you can store other people’s files as well.
Join Filecoin today and store personal or other important information without hassles. The storage space, usage of the storage, pricing is not controlled by the individual organization. Instead, Filecoin (FIL) facilitates open markets for securely storing and retrieving files. Anyone can become a member of Filecoin.
Filecoin comprises “blockchain” and “native cryptocurrency”. On every file storage, the storage miner will get units of Filecoin (FIL). FIL blockchain is responsible for recording transactions to either send and receive. Also, blockchain collects the proof from the miners that the files are stored in the correct way.
Who are the founders of Filecoin (FIL)?
Filecoin was introduced by Juan Benet. Benet is an American computer scientist, who was born in March 1988. He is the founder of Protocol Labs. The company is popular for computer network research and development. After founding the company in May 2014, Benet has participated in “Y Combinator” with the core intention of encouraging Filecoin (FIL), IPFS and other projects.
Juan Benet is well known as an IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) creator. IPFS is a P2P decentralized protocol.
In 2017, Protocol Labs received a token purchase to secure funds for further development of Filecoin. It was raised upto $205 million.
What makes Filecoin (FIL) unique?
The ultimate goal of Filecoin (FIL) is to store information in a decentralized way.
There are cloud storage organizations such as Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services and more in the market. These companies are inclined to the difficulty of centralization.
Thanks to Filecoin (FIL)
Filecoin (FIL) leverages its decentralized nature in order to secure and protect the integrity of data storage locations. On the other hand, Filecoin is making it simple to retrieve and difficult to censor.
“Open market” is one of the attractive features offered by Filecoin (FIL). Anybody can store or retrieve their files in open markets. No permission is required to become a member of the Filecoin network. A miner just needs a strong internet connection and additional disk space.
Filecoin offers competitive prices. User’s don’t need to burn their pockets to store their files on Filecoin (FIL). Since there is no corporate pricing, the cost for storing or retrieving the files are managed by supply and demand.
Reliable storage is another unique feature of Filecoin. Because the user needs to pay for storing their files. Filecoin (FIL) gives a viable solution for user’s files to stay available around the clock. User files are stored on desktops or computers that are reliable and connected online.
How many Filecoin (FIL) coins are there in circulation?
As mentioned above, Filecoin was developed by Protocol Labs. The company denotes Filecoin’s (FIL) as “Market for Data”. It means users can sell their own storage space or additional storage space to others, who are looking to save their files.
Filecoin tokens can be traded by
- Developers
- Storage miners
- Token holders
- Clients and
- Ecosystem partners
As per Protocol Labs rules, Filecoin (FIL) markets are file storage or retrieval and on-exchange Filecoin token trading.
There are 400 storage miners who will participate in the Space Race in 2020. This was the good reason to increase the capacity of Filecoin’s network by more than 325 pebibytes. As per analysis, around 3.5 million Filecoin tokens will be issued to the Space Race members.
The circulating supply of Filecoin (FIL) is 96 million. Among them, 1.97 billion Filecoin tokens have been supplied. The current price of Filecoin is $68.75. The Filecoin token price is up 1.1% in the past 24 hours. Token price may vary from time to time.
How does Filecoin (FIL) work?
It’s no surprise that the Filecoin (FIL) working model is similar to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and more. But there are few basic differences that you need to be aware of.
Let’s have a look at the Filecoin working model.
The Network
Filecoin (FIL) is a decentralized network. At P2P networks, peers will communicate or transfer information with each other. Also, they can discover new peers and share the information securely. The data such as blocks or personal messages flow even when there are hundreds of peers connected on the network.
Filecoin (FIL) nodes
Filecoin nodes are also called Filecoin clients, these nodes are responsible to validate every message or data in the block. Also, Filecoin clients can publish several types of messages to the blockchain network through broadcasting techniques. Let’s consider, a client can publish the storage space information to send Filecoin from one address to another.
Managing and handling the Filecoin node is an easy task. The task involves a program that is running around the clock.
Filecoin (FIL) miners
The Filecoin miners are responsible to provide services by executing multiple deals. For every 30 seconds, a new deal is appended. Miners will collect Filecoin rewards for executing every new deal. Managing and running a miner could be a difficult and high-technical job. It requires powerful hardware requirements.
Deals
Now let’s talk about deals in Filecoin (FIL).
There are two types of deals such as
- Storage deals
- Retrieval deals
Storage deal – It is the agreement between storage miners and clients to store files or information in the network. Once the storage deal is initiated by the client, the storage miner will receive the files to store. Also, miners will prove to the blockchain that the data is stored according to terms. In the end, miners will receive rewards. If failed, the miner will lose the Filecoin.
Retrieval deal – It is the agreement between retrieval miners and clients. The retrieval miners need to extract the files or information that is stored securely in the network.
Proofs
The real game of Filecoin. As mentioned earlier, the storage miner needs to prove to the client or chain that they’re storing the files or information according to the deal terms. It simply means miners are storing all the received files and storing them for a lifetime. Cryptographic proofs are used for validating the deals.
Wrapping up
Filecoin is a decentralized data stored network. Filecoin was created by Juan Benet in Protocol Labs. He also created IPFS – Interplanetary File System. At Filecoin, users can store their files or sell the storage space on an open platform. Keeping it simple, Filecoin acts as the security layer for the InterPlanetary File System. IPFS is the p2p network that allows sending and receiving data files. Filecoin (FIL) turns IPFS Storage System – Algorithmic market. Users can store or distribute the files on the network. Storage miners collect payment from users for storage usage.
