Filecoin is gearing up to launch its mainnet today, and many of the major cryptocurrency exchanges have announced that they will be listing its eponymous token FIL. But with rival EOS confirming that it has inked a deal with Google Cloud, the entire cloud storage industry now looks a lot different than it did when Protocol Labs first launched the Filecoin ICO three years ago.
As previously reported by Forkast.News, blockchain-powered cloud storage upstarts are becoming increasingly competitive against large and established cloud providers. During the “Space Race” proving ground competition, over 230 pebibytes (PiB), or around 260 million gigabytes (GB) of storage power was accumulated over a three-week span. While early iterations of blockchain-based cloud storage were criticized for being slow and unreliable, given Google’s interest in EOS, it’s clear that this is no longer the case and the technology is now considered to be enterprise grade.
“As organizations begin to incorporate distributed ledger technology into their infrastructures, we are committed to ensuring that the information on public blockchains are securely stored, reliably available, and can be accessed in meaningful ways,” Allen Day, Developer Advocate at Google Cloud, said in public remarks.
Good for Google, good for EOS
Aside from being a broader play for blockchain cloud storage, Google’s linking up with EOS can be viewed as an endorsement of a platform that has struggled with reputational issues since its inception.
EOS has grappled with perceptions of being a toxic mix, even for the blockchain space, of centralized governance with China-based stakeholders and its initial torrent of grandiose claims during its initial ICO, which created a cloud of questions around the project when it first was listed.
Fighting skepticism is easy with institutional-grade partnerships. It would also create a new era of competition in the space: With Google Cloud’s vote of confidence in EOS, how might, say, Microsoft react?
Amazon’s AWS was an early endorser of blockchain technology and has supported building out blockchain tech on its cloud servers for some time. Would they be the next ones to engage in such a tie-up like Google and EOS?
The market wants more blockchain storage solutions
Futures for Filecoin have been up and down as the market determines what sort of impact EOS’ tie-up with Google is going to have on Filecoin’s market share, but as the dust settled and the platform came closer to launching, futures rallied significantly. According to Crypto.com’s price tracker, as North America awoke, futures for FIL jumped by nearly 88%. On-week they are up approximately 177%. Though crypto and price volatility — particularly pump-and-dumps — are nearly synonymous, a concerted display of interest by the market, especially after a long and arduous development process, shows that the vertical (as a whole) is ready for liftoff.
