Once raised $257 million in 30 minutes at a public offering price of $5, Filecoin, known as the most sought-after project at the time, ushered in a bright moment again in 2020 when hot spots were scarce.

Looking back on the past three years, with the four delays of the mainnet launch, the market has successively performed dramas such as the loss of early participants, the ebb and flow of funds, and the flood of cloud computing power. Behind each change, countless individuals are involved. The collective three years of individuals make up today's Filecoin market.

Author/Wang Dashu

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Cloud Computing Dilemma

Such advertisements can be seen in various communities in the currency circle, and there are many slogans that define Filecoin as the next Bitcoin or Ethereum, and the community where the chain catcher is located is almost completely covered by Filecoin's cloud computing power advertisements. And the quotations in the advertisements are varied.

"I bought the Filecoin cloud computing power, which is known as the lowest price in the whole network last week, with a price tag of 99U per T. At that time, I tried to buy 20T, and the cost was less than 2000U. The next day, a manufacturer with a price of 88U per T appeared in other groups. Compared with the one in my hand, there is a difference of 11U per T. Calculated as a whole, the difference is about 1,500 yuan. The price difference is not small. Fortunately, there is no all in, otherwise it will be painful!" Mu, a senior digital currency investor who has been following Filecoin since April Mu told the chain catcher that for retail investors, buying mining machines by themselves is expensive and difficult to operate and maintain. The unit price of the unit ranges from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, and the overall cost is too high. Computing power, affordable price, and low investment threshold.

Although the investment threshold is low, the risk is not small at all. The main network has not yet been launched, and it is still unknown when FIL coins will be available. Even if it is launched later, the authenticity of the output needs to be verified, and this is almost a common problem of cloud computing power platforms. Money fisherman in troubled waters.

In fact, since the first half of the year, Golden Hashrate Cloud, Mars Cloud Mine, Fengxue, Hufu, BKEX, HomiEx, HyperPay, and Cloud Management Hashrate have emerged one after another. According to industry insiders, there are already 500+ sales companies on the market, which shows that the market The heat is high.

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IPFS ecological map

But in the eyes of the mining machine merchant Lao Fu, this is not a good sign. "There are so many cloud computing power sellers in the market. Looking at the currency circle, the mining circle and even the chain circle, there are very few new ones in these years, and it is basically a stock market. So in the end, we must face a question: who to sell to? It is bound to need It can only be consumed by recruiting newcomers, so recruiting newcomers is a problem.”

According to Lao Fu’s observations, currently in the promotion of new products, there are already sales teams or manufacturers who want to use the power of coils to drive new traffic into the market.

He also revealed that in addition to attracting newcomers, the large-scale emergence of cloud computing platforms also caused him headaches. Those who sell cloud computing power are basically exchanges and mining pools. Their starting point is mostly to use the name of selling Filecoin cloud computing power as platform diversion. Filecoin vendors with business verticals feel a lot of pressure.

But not all. According to Andy, a partner of 1475, although there are more than 200 manufacturers in the market at present, there are not many with real technology. In contrast, the technical capabilities of most cloud computing platforms may be more limited. There will be some cloud computing power platforms that need to rely on the supply chain and technology research and development capabilities of manufacturers. On the other hand, cloud computing power platforms are also very likely to become distributors of mining machine manufacturers.

"Before the Filecoin mainnet goes online, the mining machine is equivalent to a commodity, and the comparison between manufacturers is based on marketing capabilities. After the mainnet goes online, the mining machine is an investment product, which naturally requires a return on investment, and the return on investment means With all-round requirements for products and technologies, there is a high probability that some mining machine manufacturers will be filtered out, and the entire track will be narrowed.” Andy added analysis.

However, in the eyes of Lao Fu, after the launch of the mainnet, not only will some mining machine manufacturers whose technology is not up to standard be eliminated, but also the fund project named Filecoin will have nowhere to hide.

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Coincidentally, Allen, the head of IPFSDATA interstellar storage, has a similar view to Lao Fu. As an early participant of Filecoin, he has witnessed the highlight of Filecoin raising 257 million US dollars in 30 minutes at a public offering price of 5 US dollars during the ICO craze in 2017 At the same time, I also witnessed the embarrassing stage when the mainnet launch was nowhere in sight in the cold winter of the digital currency market in 2018. Of course, it also included the wave of funds set off in the name of Filecoin.

However, Allen told Chain Catcher that most of Filecoin’s 50 billion RMB market size is driven by funds. This group learned about Filecoin from early evangelists in 2018, and then the blowout of various fund projects in the first half of 2019 , quickly bound Filecoin to the word "MLM", so that the outside world will think of fraud when they hear IPFS mining machines.

According to him, there were almost 20 funds in the market at the peak of the time, among which the CAI team should be the earliest Filecoin fund. From the launch of the exchange and the development conference in Singapore at the end of 2108, it began to take advantage of the popularity of the Filecoin market to complete Recruitment, and then launch the dual mining mode, that is, promise users that before Filecoin goes online, they can use the snail mining machine to mine the token CAI issued by the project. At the beginning of the year, the withdrawal of coins was terminated and the road was gone. This model has completed multiple transfers in a period of one year, and finally misappropriated 2 billion yuan.

According to media reports at the time, the market price of the snail mining machine sold by the CAI team was nearly 6,000 yuan/unit, but the unit cost price was less than 1,000 yuan, and the price was once raised to 8,000 yuan/unit before running away. In order to confuse the public, the number of people deceived is about 7,000, and there are also victims based on families. For example, in the previous report of All-Weather Technology, it was mentioned that the victims and their parents were defrauded of 400,000 in total.

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Snail mining machine

Not only investors, but also the hardware suppliers of the CAI team are not immune. According to Allen's recollection, after CAI ran away, there were still hundreds of thousands of unpaid snail mining machine stocks left. The suppliers in these account periods were in the CAI team After being arrested and brought to justice, he has nowhere to collect the money, so he can only admit his guilt.

He also revealed that there are still some capital projects on the market that have not run away. With the launch of the mainnet, the official rules will soon be clear. What they think about is how to avoid legal risks caused by thunderstorms. According to Allen’s observation, at present, there are three general solutions for capital projects.

The second solution is to access the POC project, which is relatively easy to implement due to the low hardware cost required by the POC mining machine. And the last one is to rewrite tokens, issue projects, and mine tokens for new projects, so as to redeem them for investors.

However, these three plans are not very realistic in Lao Fu’s view. He believes that the capital market model will inevitably collapse and run away, and may lead to large-scale criminal cases at that time.

However, Liu Lingling, the person in charge of Starbit, an early participant, believes that the aforementioned phenomenon is inevitable. "Funds come and go in line with the law of early market development. The early market was almost always promoted and developed by barbarians, which is difficult for people sitting in the office. But on the other hand, the barbaric behavior also really makes the industry be posted by the outside world. negatively labeled."

In fact, Commander Liu’s opinion is just as Allen lamented. The teams working in this market often bring in a small amount of funds, while those “wild ways” bring in a large amount of funds. This contrast In the final analysis, it is still human nature.

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Early entrants with very different fates

In fact, whether it is the gathering of cloud computing power or the prevalence of funds, the market development trajectory is closely related to Filecoin's official actions. In the three years since Filecoin completed its fundraising, the mainnet launch has been postponed four times. Even though the mainnet launch is approaching, there are still many rules that are not yet perfect, and to some extent, various uncertainties have caused a flood of funds in disguise. Soil is provided.

On the other hand, some early investors and participants were also embarrassed.

Allen told Chain Catcher that the people who participated in Filecoin as early as 2017 can be divided into three categories: investors who participated in the official ICO, software and hardware technology research and development companies, and mining machine manufacturers. Among them, the most embarrassing thing is the mining machine manufacturers. They face the same payment pressure as the capital market, and even greater pressure than the capital market.

"Since the official announcement last year that GPU mining was used, most manufacturers were in a panic. Many of them bought Intel servers, and they couldn't dig out coins at all. Many of them collapsed, and now the remaining There are not many, and the rest either choose to access POC to redeem small mine coins for investors, or find reasons to run away.” Lao Fu told the chain catcher that not long ago, a relatively large early miner took hacking as an excuse. The gimmick is gone.

In addition to the miners facing the crisis of payment, investors who hoarded hardware in the early stage also faced the problem of how to consume low-configuration hardware that could not be adapted to the official mining parameters. Similar to the early miners with funds, they can also choose to develop A POC project that adapts these hardware to mine some small coins, or sell it to the POC project party at a low price.

Lao Fu said frankly that projects such as Yottachain and Turbine chose to develop small mining coin projects after seeing the market brought about by the acceptance demand of early miners and capital markets and the inventory consumption demand of hoarding parties, and the small mining coin track is very fast. There may be a wave of enthusiasm.

However, in Liu Lingling’s view, whether it is adversity or upsurge, the core reason for the market development so far is that practitioners are seriously optimistic and overestimate the launch timeline of the Filecoin mainnet and verify that they underestimate the technical difficulty of IPFS mining.

"When researching the project in September 2017, I noticed that Filecoin, in view of the past experience in technology on the Internet, judged that its feasibility is very high, and it will be more realistic to implement in the future, so in 2018, I started to start a mining machine operation and maintenance system. At that time, it was estimated that the mainnet would be launched at the end of the year, but it has been delayed until now.” Commander Liu said.

He also lamented that during the three years when the Filecoin mainnet was launched erratically, Interstellar Bit experienced some twists and turns. "First of all, as far as the technology research and development team is concerned, if they fail to make corresponding results within a cycle, they will inevitably face the choice of changing tracks. In addition, it happened to be the market downturn at the end of 2018. The team was somewhat discouraged and lost some talents. , but fortunately, the value of the remaining partners is very consistent. During the period of insisting on Filecoin-related technical research, some Internet businesses were simultaneously started, allowing the company to operate smoothly until now.”

However, compared with mining machine manufacturers and software and hardware technology R&D companies, investors who participated in the official ICO in the early stage bear the least pressure and risk.

Xie Dapao, who has assembled his own computer to mine bitcoins since his junior year, is one of the 2,000 investors who participated in the official ICO.

“At that time, there were very few distributed storage projects, because I came from a research and development background, and I deduced the development path of Filecoin with a few brothers. I felt that it was more practical, so I participated in the official public offering through my friends.” Xie Dapao said that he participated in the Filecoin ICO at that time The threshold is very high, requiring overseas identity, fixed monthly turnover and a corresponding amount of personal assets. If the main network has not been launched in 2020, the investment funds will be refunded to these 2,000 investors.