Filecoin (FIL) price jumps 24% ahead of network upgrade

• Filecoin’s native token FIL spiked 24% to around $6.44 on Monday.
• The launch of the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM), expected on 14 March, has the community buzzing.
• FVM brings smart contracts and network programmability to the Filecoin network.

Filecoin, a decentralised storage network that allows users to access efficient blockchain-based file storage at low, is hours away from a major network upgrade. The excitement around the new features that come with the upgrade, alongside broader market exuberance, has helped push the value of the native FIL token higher.

Filecoin price today

FIL was trading around $6.36 at 2:00 pm ET on Monday, up more than 24% in the past 24 hours. According to data from TradingView, the cryptocurrency’s price had touched an intraday high of $6.44 on major crypto exchange Coinbase.

Per the market data from CoinGecko, the file storage platform’s native token has jumped more than 32% over the past month.

The broader cryptocurrency market has rallied hard in the past 24 hours, with massive buying pressure on Monday as the markets reacted to news of the US government working to backstop failed banks. 

As CoinJournal reported, the sentiment flip saw Bitcoin add over $4,000 in 24 hours as bulls rallied to prices above $24,000. Most altcoins also soared, with the total cryptocurrency market cap rising nearly 15% to over $1.16 trillion.

But for Filecoin, as noted above, the upside momentum also included buyside pressure catalysed by an upcoming network upgrade.  In February, the Filecoin developer team announced that the Filecoin Virtual Machine (FVM) would go live in March.

The price of FIL tokens jumped more than 26% on the day after the Filecoin news reached the market. Just like then, the latest price surge comes as the developer team confirmed that FVM would go live on Tuesday, 14 March 2023. 

This is because the upgrade is set to introduce smart contracts, allowing for the creation and deployment of decentralised applications (dApps) on Filecoin. The FVM upgrade also unlocks features such as collateral lending and liquid staking.

“Basically – if you regard the Filecoin storage network as a massive decentralized data warehouse whose state is being constantly proven to the public, you can think of the FVM as a programmable controller for it,” the Filecoin team noted last week.