Filecoin Launch Finally Brings $200M ICO to Fruition

Oct 15, 2020 at 14:55 UTCUpdated Oct 15, 2020 at 15:59 UTC.The Filecoin network pivoted to mainnet at block 148,888, or approximately 14:44 UTC. With that, its FIL tokens will begin their distribution.

The Filecoin team wrote in a post announcing the transition the block number for mainnet launch signifies "Prosperity for life" in Chinese, chosen "To honor the epic contribution by our Chinese mining community to Filecoin's long-term success."

It should be noted the tokens distributed today will basically all be subject to a vesting schedule, so only a very small portion of the total supply of 2 billion FIL in the Filecoin system would count as circulating.

The circulating supply at launch should be much, much smaller than the 200 million tokens sold in the 2017 initial coin offering, making for a vastly smaller market capitalization by convention.

Despite multiple delays, the Filecoin project has attracted considerable attention, particularly in China where investors have been speculating heavily on the network's mining hardware and the FIL token.

CoinList's Scott Keto contends the first market to actually have FIL tokens available for purchase will likely be CoinList Pro.The launch of Filecoin is itself a milestone for CoinList, a company that was spun out from Naval Ravikant's AngelList to manage the gigantic token sale for Filecoin, closing in September 2017.

The token sale ultimately raised over $200 million, the largest ICO to that point.

"There are many folks already announced as early Filecoin users, and still more to come next week," Filecoin's Ian Darrow told CoinDesk via email.

CoinList is playing a key role in the distribution of FIL tokens today, managing 55% of the distribution, for all the ICO participants who did not indicate a self-custody or external solution for the distribution, Keto explained.

While the ICO era was controversial for its large number of scams, the best-known token sales have largely delivered their promised products.