Filecoin surges 50% in a week

In the past seven days the price of Filecoin (FIL) has risen by 50%. The asset is trading above $7.

Colin Wu suggested that the FIL rally is tied to the announced launch of smart contracts in March, which would make the network a fully fledged Layer 1 blockchain, he said.

Filecoin announced that it will launch smart contracts in Mar’23, making it a fully-fledged L1. FIL rose by 23% in 24 hours. There are currently 3,785 active miners on the Filecoin network, storing 18.767 EiB of information, and staking 134,023,969 FIL.

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) February 17, 2023

In anticipation of the network’s own Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM), the project held a hackathon which it called the most successful in its history. The event drew more than 1,000 participants.

🚀The world’s biggest #FVM hackathon🚀

In anticipation of the FVM launch, the Filecoin community completed its most successful hackathon to date for devs kicking off building with FEVM! Project submissions included use cases like DataDAOs, DeFi & more!👇 https://t.co/Ri0x7WS15L pic.twitter.com/tuKnMa0utT

— Filecoin (@Filecoin) February 19, 2023

According to the statement, they presented 279 projects, including uses of the FVM in areas such as DataDAO, DeFi and others. The already launched testnet solution interacts with the EVM, enabling cross-chain bridges and ensuring compatibility with L2 protocols.

Despite FIL’s price rise, the cryptocurrency’s price remains well below its all-time high; in April 2021 the coin traded above $236.

In January, the Filecoin Foundation announced plans to launch a decentralised file system in space.