Filecoin Early Investors Had Chance to Make 100x

Hello Defiers! Here’s what’s happening,

• Filecoin token launches at many times the 2017 presale price
• Rally is the latest player in the creator coins space with RLY launch
• Lido wants to make ETH2 staking easier
• Polymarket moving to Layer 2 as volume climbs
• Vesper is latest platform aiming to simplify DeFi investing

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Filecoin’s Early Investors Had The Chance to Make 100x

Filecoin had a record breaking $257M token sale in the 2017 boom days, promising to bring decentralized file sharing to the world, but all investors had to show for it in the three years since, was FIL token IOUs as the project repeatedly delayed its launch.

The day finally came yesterday, and for many, it was probably worth the wait.

FIL jumped to as high as $114 in the hours after it was listed, according to Coingecko. That’s about 100 times higher than what early VCs and accredited investors were able to buy three years ago. Thursday was the first time they were able to cash out.

Filecoin’s token has more than halved from its peak and is now trading at around $46. With a circulating supply of ~15M, its market cap is at almost $800M, already within the 30 most valuable coins in crypto. Its max supply of 2B puts its fully diluted valuation at a whopping $100B.

Andreessen & Sequoia

The project had raised $52M from around 150 investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and Winklevoss Capital, who were able to buy the token at $0.75, and another ~$200M at an ICO limited only to accredited investors, who were able to buy the token for between $1 and $6.

FIL is used to incentivize a distributed network which provides file sharing and storage, and aims to become a cheap and censorship-resistant way of storing data.

Filecoin is the latest of major ICOs to finally deliver (others this year include Polkadot and OMG), chipping away at the narrative that token sales of the boom days were all scams.

🌱 Sign Up for Seed Club Hackathon!

Seed Club Hackathon (from @seedclubhq) is a two-week hackathon for developers to build tools for creators and their social token based projects. There are Over $10k in bounties/prizes - register here https://gitcoin.co/hackathon/seed-club-hacks/onboard

Rally Launches RLY Token with Delegated Vault Mining

By Cooper Turley

Rally has released its native governance token RLY to become a backbone for creators to issue their own tokens.

Lido Enters the ETH2 Staking Conversation

By Cooper Turley

Lido wants to make it easier to stake ETH during the initial phase of Ethereum’s biggest-ever overhaul.

Prediction Markets Platform Polymarket Joins Layer 2

By Cooper Turley

Rising prediction market Polymarket has taken their talents to Layer 2 to offer free trades with instant execution, credit card support and email logins.

Ex Bitcoin Dev Jeff Garzik Builds DeFi Investment Platform

DeFi trading strategies are growing increasingly more complex. Bloq co-founder and former Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik is launching Vesper to provide an easier gateway into open finance investing.

There’s an AMM versus order book debate going on in crypto Twitter. Here’s one of the most interesting threads.

Andrew Kang @RewkangAMMs aren't broken Professional MM's don't need them, but they are great for the rest of us and improve liquidity for the space as whole Good thing that blockchain data is public so we can see what's really going on

SBF @SBF_Alameda1) Can you fix AMMs?7:25 PM ∙ Oct 15, 2020184Likes35Retweets

The Defiant is a daily newsletter focusing on decentralized finance, a new financial system that’s being built on top of open blockchains. The space is evolving at breakneck speed and revolutionizing tech and money. Sign up to learn more and keep up on the latest, most interesting developments. Subscribers get full access at $10/month or $100/year, while free signups get only part of the content.

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About the founder and editor: Camila Russo is the author of The Infinite Machine, the first book on the history of Ethereum, and was previously a Bloomberg News markets reporter based in New York, Madrid and Buenos Aires. She has extensively covered crypto and finance, and now is diving into DeFi, the intersection of the two.