Filecoin Rises on Interconnects and Chinese Interest

The Filecoin project is up over 56% in seven days.

Filecoin announced on March 27 that its miners and Livepeer miners could now co-mine. The mining connection is rare in the cryptocurrency world, with Dogecoin and LIVECOIN being the best known combination. Filecoin is up on the news, but the announcement is part of a thread of good news flow for the project.

The project explains in its accompanying blog post why the projects are integrating. Filecoin and Livepeer both work extensively with decentralized data networks. Filecoin works with files of most types. Livepeer, works in particular with video files. Both require much of the same processing, however, so their mining requirements are similar. Both see improvements from working with ASICs, the hardware focused on miners.

Mining works well, Filecoin says, because its miners can store a block of video. The miner benefits from the added revenue, while both projects gain from having a broader pool of miners. 

The two companies also see a future improvement, as their cooperation can bring edge computing to web3 applications. Edge computing is a form of distributed computing in which some processing is done outside of the data center. In mobile telephony, this is usually at a cell site. The projects see this as a particularly fruitful use case for decentralized platforms.

News Flow

The project started its current run with an announcement from Grayscale. The massive Bitcoin whale announced its Grayscale Filecoin Fund on March 17. Grayscale also announced four other cryptocurrency funds. These included Basic Attention Token, Chainlink, Decentraland, and, notably Livepeer. 

Since then, interest in the project has grown. Chinese crypto journalist Wu Blockchain pointed out a set of reasons other than those seen in Grayscale’s backyard. 

Beyond the reasons above, Wu Blockchain also noted that COINBASE launched new storage tokens, and that Filecoin and Chainlink (LINK) was a factor.

Moreover, Wu Blockchain also noted that Filecoin had its own price dynamics, and that the recent Bitcoin drop did not affect it. The coin’s market capitalization is passing THETA into the Top-9 on some exchanges. As of the morning of March 27, the price had hit a new ATH of $134.