Filecoin weakens after rocketing on mainnet launch

FIL/USD price quickly doubled as Filecoin finally launched its mainnet, but  showed weakness of around $60 afterwards

The price of Filecoin’s native token is trading at prices around 120% higher, despite overall negative sentiment across the crypto markets.

After the Filecoin mainnet went live Thursday, October 15 at around 14:45 UTC, the subsequent listing of the token on major exchanges helped push its value by more than 120%.

After opening around $30, the price of the FIL token against the US dollar quickly jumped to $60 on most exchanges. The price rocketed in late trading sessions as major exchanges Binance, Gate.io, Kraken, Gemini, and FTX, among others, announced trading support.

As such, prices varied greatly between exchanges, with some posting highs of $150- $200. After Thursday’s wild swings, the price is now steady. For example, FIL/USD rose to a high of $150 on Kraken before retracing.

FIL/USD is trading around $60 as of writing, up nearly 6% in the past half an hour and over 114% in the past 24 hours.

Trading volume has more than doubled, as the token currently ranked 25th on CoinMarketCap posts intraday trading volumes of more than $306 million. Yesterday, just over $155 million worth of FIL tokens were traded.

Over 45% of the daily volume is on Binance, where FIL/USDT has seen about 33.52% of the volume. The FIL/BTC pair accounts for about 11.58% of trades.

Filecoin conducted its initial coin offering (ICO) in 2017, netting $205 million. Although the initial plan was to go live in mid-2019, the team moved it to block 148,888, which occurred on Thursday. Currently, the market cap has jumped to $912 million.

Crypto market outlook

The price of Filecoin is likely to retreat further given the overall sentiment across the crypto markets.

As can be seen in the chart below, most assets are trading lower on the day. Bitcoin is priced around $11,208 as of writing and is likely to test lower levels after touching lows of $11,160.

In the past 24 hours, the top crypto has dropped nearly 3% with a sharp decline after major exchange OKEx notified its customers that it had suspended all digital asset withdrawals due to an investigation by authorities.

Ethereum, XRP, Bitcoin Cash, Polkadot, and ChainLink are all negative between 2% and 6% over the past 24 hours.