Filecoin (FIL): A cryptocurrency that turns hard drives into cloud storage
Filecoin (FIL) is the token of the largest decentralized storage network, initiated by the Protocol Labs team in 2017 and officially launched in 2020. Simply put, it's like a blockchain version of Baidu Cloud + Alibaba Cloud, but completely decentralized, with no central company controlling your data.
The core idea is: there are countless idle hard drives around the world, why not connect them and let everyone rent out storage space to make money? Users want to store files, so they pay FIL to miners (storage providers), who encrypt the files and distribute them across their hard drives. When needed, they can be retrieved at any time. The entire process relies on blockchain to ensure that the files are actually stored, not lost, and not tampered with.
Filecoin miners are divided into two types: storage miners (responsible for storing files) and retrieval miners (responsible for quickly delivering files to users). Mining does not require supercomputers, but it does need large-capacity hard drives and stable bandwidth. In the early days, many people bought hard drives to build cabinets to 'mine FIL', somewhat like the Bitcoin ASIC miner craze of the 2010s. The total supply of FIL is 2 billion tokens, of which 70% is allocated to miners and ecological development.
By 2025, Filecoin's actual storage capacity has exceeded 100 EiB (1 EiB ≈ 1000 PB), storing a vast amount of content including movies, research data, NFTs, and Web3 websites. Its price is highly volatile, peaking at over 200 dollars in 2021, then dropping to as low as 2 dollars, and now fluctuating between 3-10 dollars.
The advantage is that it truly addresses the pain points of centralized cloud storage: data sovereignty, long-term preservation, and lower costs (much cheaper than AWS). The downside is that network speed and retrieval efficiency cannot match traditional cloud services, making it less user-friendly. Overall, Filecoin is not a quick-money project for speculating on coins, but a fundamental infrastructure currency that genuinely aims to change the landscape of internet storage. If you believe that in the future Web3 era, data should be under your control, Filecoin is a contender worth paying attention to.
$FIL
{future}(FILUSDT)