Babbitt Observation | With a 6-day continuous rise against the trend and a total market value approaching 908.1 billion, is there still room for imagination for FIL?

In the past two days, FIL, the leader of the storage sector, has started to rise, and it is rising against the trend. As of press time, the price is close to $70.

Data from Huobi Exchange shows that FIL trading is very active, with a 24-hour turnover of nearly 3.3 billion yuan, ranking third.

More data shows that FIL has increased by nearly 30% in the past week and 80% in the past month. If we only refer to the price of Huobi Exchange, FIL has tripled from the low of $21. But it is far from the historical high of $220.

Is this increase surprising? Not at all. Since the start of this round of bull market, DeFi concept coins have generally increased by more than 10 times. From the perspective of the storage sector, FIL's increase is far less than AR, which has nearly doubled by 6 times.

From this perspective, the price of FIL seems to have room to rise. However, if we shift our perspective from the price of a single FIL to the FIL project itself, the situation may be different.

According to Feixiaohao data, FIL’s circulating market value is 45.5 billion yuan, ranking 14th in the cryptocurrency rankings, 13th is DOGE, and 15th is Theta.

At present, the circulation of FIL is about 100 million, accounting for 5.01% of its total supply, which means that the total market value of FIL is close to 908.1 billion yuan. Small circulation and high market value are very special for FIL among the top 20 cryptocurrencies in terms of market value.

Computing power has been steadily increasing, and cloud computing products have been increasing in price several times.

Currently, according to the data from the Filscan block browser, among the released FIL, there are approximately 100 million FIL in circulation, accounting for 36.26%, 49 million FIL are pledged in sectors, accounting for 17.63%, 110 million FIL are to be released as rewards, accounting for 39.24%, and 20 million FIL are destroyed, accounting for 6.87%.

Blockchain browser data also shows that currently, the Filecoin network's total computing power is 3.32EiB, which is roughly equivalent to 3.32 billion GB when converted into the familiar GB.

In addition, the computing power of the Filecoin network has grown very steadily in the past 30 days. In fact, data shows that the computing power growth is gradually accelerating.

Logically, as the price rises, the packaging cost of miners' effective computing power will continue to rise, and the computing power increase will slow down, but this did not happen. Obviously, this may mean that the miners continue to be optimistic about the future price of FIL, and therefore continue to increase their stakes. Although some Filecoin computing power providers have ridiculed that the cost of mining is getting higher and higher and they can no longer afford it, they still recommend products in their WeChat Moments and call on more people to join the mining army. From the mining market, we can also see that many cloud computing power merchants have raised prices several times after the New Year.

In addition, news shows that FIL will start to reduce production on April 25, with a daily reduction of 43.2%, which may be another blow to miners. In other words, the original production is about 648,000 pieces per day, which will be reduced by 280,000 pieces later.

However, from the perspective of secondary market circulation, given the steady increase in computing power, the amount of pledged and destroyed will also increase, which may make the incremental circulation of FIL smaller and smaller. What impact this will have on the market price is still uncertain.

NFT+Filecoin, unleash more imagination?

Many people say that most of Filecoin's data is ineffectively stored by miners, which is probably true, but in the past year, Filecoin developers have funded about 40 projects to incentivize the storage of useful data on Filecoin. These projects also cover various Filecoin network usage scenarios and some practical tools, such as decentralized cloud disks.

But in fact, how much users need decentralized storage may still be a question mark. As we all know, even some data related to decentralized experience are not stored in a decentralized manner, and ordinary users don’t care.

But what’s interesting is that the recent popularity of NFTs may have given more imagination to on-chain storage such as Filecoin.

For example, in early February, Why, a core developer of the Filecoin official team, proposed the idea of ​​adding NFT to the Filecoin network, which sparked heated discussions in the Filecoin community.

In fact, taking the encrypted artwork in NFT as an example, NFT is only the ownership certificate of the artwork, but the artwork behind it is simply a JPEG or video file, which is stored on a server. If the buyer wants the source file, he must extract the file from a specific website through an HTTP address.

The problem is, what if the website crashes? Recently, the crypto art website VIV3 was attacked and the official website login channel was closed, which made users who had previously purchased the platform’s art packages unable to log in and withdraw NFTs.

The IPFS technology behind Fileocin allows files to be stored on the chain. Even if certain problems cause the website to crash, the IPFS system can allow buyers to extract files from another server, thus ensuring the storage security of the artwork.

However, most NFTs are currently manufactured based on the Ethereum network, and the Filecoin network does not support the manufacture and issuance of NFTs.

Judging from the current situation, this is not a market for Filecoin alone. Projects like Arweave have received support from many well-known NFT projects because the latter is a one-time payment for permanent storage.