Filecoin history: six years from paper to network
A paper from the IPFS team
Juan Benet founded Protocol Labs in May 2014, the company behind the IPFS file protocol. On 15 July 2014 it published the first version of Filecoin. The idea: anyone with spare disk space can store other people’s files and get paid in a token.
2017: over 205 million dollars
Protocol Labs published the full whitepaper in August 2017 and raised over 205 million dollars in an ICO, according to The Block. The network itself took three more years.
October 2020: the launch
The mainnet went live on 15 October 2020 at block 148,888. Storage providers, Filecoin’s miners, lock FIL as collateral and prove every 24 hours that they still hold the data. Proof of Replication shows a copy exists; Proof of Spacetime shows it stayed there over time.
From 236 dollars to under one
FIL set its all-time high of 236.84 dollars on 1 April 2021, by CoinGecko data, less than six months after launch. It then fell for years and hit its lowest recorded price, 0.6124 dollars, on 18 August 2026. About 839 million FIL are in circulation.