FIL Rockets After Filecoin Integrates With Solana

Filecoin, a decentralized file storage network, is up 17% in three days after announcing an integration with Solana, the bubbling Layer 1 network.

Filecoin announced the news on Feb. 16, revealing it would host Solana’s block history moving forward. The move allows Solana-based ecosystem and infrastructure projects to move away from centralized data storage solutions, bolstering Solana’s decentralization.

“By leveraging Filecoin's decentralized storage capabilities, Solana can achieve data redundancy, scalability, and enhanced security while staying true to its decentralized ethos,” Filecoin tweeted. “Solana is utilizing Filecoin to make its block history more accessible and usable for infrastructure providers, explorers, indexers, and anyone needing historical access.”

“I am really excited to see this launch,” said Anatoly Yakovenko. “Huge thanks to Filecoin for building an awesome decentralized archive layer.”

The news has propelled bullish momentum for Filecoin’s native FIL token, which is up 11% in 24 hours and 28% over the past week, ranking seventh and 11th among top 100 cryptocurrencies respectively, according to CoinGecko. However, the token remains down 13% from its early-January local high.

Solana’s bullish momentum slows

The news follows a meteoric run for Solana, with its SOL token surging 470% since the end of September as concerns that FTX, the bankrupt centralized exchange, may move to offload large sums of SOL alleviated.

The bullish momentum briefly pushed Solana to overtake the Ethereum mainnet by several key metrics, with Solana’s daily active users, DEX volume, and NFT sales surpassing Ethereum in November. USDC on Solana ranked as the most-traded stablecoin in early January, also coinciding with Google search volume for “Solana” surpassing “Ethereum.”

However, Solana’s momentum came to an abrupt halt earlier this month when a catastrophic outage caused five hours of downtime and necessitated a network restart. The incident drew renewed criticism concerning Solana’s reliability and centralized architecture, marking the 11th spate of degraded performance in two years for the network.

Still, SOL is up 1.6% in 24 hours and 6.7% over seven days. SOL is the fifth-largest cryptocurrency with a $50.2B, having fallen behind BNB Chain after momentarily flipping BNB last week.