Filecoin price and where to buy FIL

What is Filecoin?

Filecoin is a decentralised storage network: providers rent out disk space and prove cryptographically that they are storing clients’ data, and are paid in FIL. Providers must also lock up FIL as collateral, which they lose if they fail to keep the data. The maximum supply is 2 billion FIL.

How to buy Filecoin, step by step

1. Pick an exchange. FIL is listed on every exchange we track. Compare fees, funding options and whether it serves your country in our exchange reviews.
2. Create and verify your account. Regulated exchanges ask for identity documents before you can deposit fiat.
3. Fund the account. A bank transfer or a stablecoin deposit usually costs far less than a card payment.
4. Buy FIL. Use the FIL/USDT or FIL/USD market, and check the cheapest venue in the table above first.
5. Decide where to keep it. On the exchange is simplest, but the exchange then holds your coins. FIL runs on its own network; withdraw only to a Filecoin address.

Where to buy Filecoin at the best price

The cheapest venue right now is marked in the table above. Add its trading fee before comparing: on FIL the venues disagree by about 0.093 percent on average, so on a small purchase the fee and the funding method usually matter more.

• The price on that venue. Each row shows the gap to our composite.
• The trading fee. Our fee comparison lists spot fees side by side.
• How you fund the account. A bank transfer or stablecoin deposit is usually far cheaper than a card payment, which often costs several percent.

Why the Filecoin price differs between exchanges

In our minute-by-minute measurement the gap between the highest and lowest venue averaged about 0.093 percent, against about 0.025 percent for Bitcoin. It went above half a percent in about nine minutes out of every thousand, and reached about 3.4 percent at its widest.

About two fifths of the FIL spot volume we track trades on a single venue. The spread figure at the top of this page is the live measurement; our guide on why crypto prices differ between exchanges explains the mechanism.

What moves the Filecoin price

The wider crypto market, and in FIL’s case its own news too. In our hourly composite, FIL moved with Bitcoin at a correlation of about 0.40, where 1 would mean identical moves, and its moves were about three times the size of Bitcoin’s.

FIL’s link to Bitcoin is weak in our data, so its own drivers matter: storage demand, token unlocks for storage providers, and leverage. The funding rates on this page show whether leveraged traders are paying to be long or short right now.

Pros and cons of Filecoin

Pros

• Real usage: paying for decentralised data storage.
• A fixed maximum supply of 2 billion.
• Listed on every exchange we track.

Cons

• Its hourly moves were about three times Bitcoin’s in our data.
• A large share of supply is released to storage providers over time.
• Its price gap between exchanges reached about 3.4 percent at its widest.

The FIL to USD converter applies the live price to any amount.