Decentralized storage project Filecoin launches long-anticipated mainnet

Decentralized information storage project Filecoin has finally launched its mainnet at block 148,888. 

The launch comes three years after Filecoin’s initial coin offering, which raised over $205 million in 2017 and was one of the largest token sales that year. The process towards Filecoin’s launch has been marked by numerous delays and a recent investor revolt against Protocol Labs, the network’s parent company. 

The platform, which is built on top of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), is meant to allow users to buy and sell unused storage using the network’s native cryptocurrency, filecoin (FIL). Filecoin users can hire miners to store or distribute data, and miners can earn rewards for completing their requests.

The Filecoin team announced its multi-phased plan to launch on mainnet in late September this year, beginning with a “pre-liftoff phase,” which gave users time to set up and prepare their systems. The platform also hosted an incentivized testnet competition called Space Race, where over 500 miners onboarded over 325 pebibytes (PiB) of storage capacity. The team says that's equivalent of having "enough space for 90 million 1080p movies, 1,400 full copies of Wikipedia, or 7 times the entire written works of mankind (in all languages) from the beginning of recorded history to the present day."

In total, there are more than 500 pebibytes (PiB) of verified storage already available for clients to use, according to Filecoin's head of operations Ian Darrow.