After the bitcoin halving where bitcoin block reward is cut in half, crypto miners have been turning to some small coins for their potential high profits.

In this year’s global mining forum held in the world’s bitcoin mining capital Sichuan, small-cap projects have been heatedly discussed among miners who have seen their profits from big coins decrease and looked for new opportunities. These individual miners are focusing on minable coins like Grin, CKB, Beam, which boast smaller market caps, but an equal or even bigger amount of potential to make money.

Filecoin is also among the heatedly discussed project. Despite several delays in its mainnet launch, the decentralized storage project continues to be a hit among Chinese miners. Since Filecoin keeps updating standards of its mining rigs, miners have been eagerly buying and selling these filecoin mining rigs since 2018.

According to Filpool operator Hu Feng, there are more than 200 Filecoin mining rig producers in China, and the total sales of Filecoin mining machines over these years are estimated to have exceeded 20 billion yuan, which is more than the sales of some major bitcoin mining machine manufacturers in the past two years.

Institutional investors are just as interested in Filecoin as retail investors. During the Forum, T01475, a large and activist IPFS node received investment from HashKey Capital and Fenbushi. Both are OG crypto VCs in China.

Though Filecoin has not yet launched its long-awaited mainnet, futures trade of its token FIL has appeared on several exchanges. As it shows on Gate.io, the futures price of FIL stands at 86 yuan (roughly $ 12.5) per coin.

A crypto trader who bought FIL at 12 yuan in its early private sale told us that the market cap with 86 yuan per coin was crazy and unsustainable. But there’re still miners at the mining conference believing that it could reach 100 yuan per coin.

After more than two years since its ICO in September 2017, the project, however, still has not launched its mainnet. The injection of large capital into the project has been eye-catching and attractive. While, so far, except those mining machine makers, we haven’t seen anyone really making money.

The performance of the coin once it goes online is worth to be seen, will it sustain its value or another pump-and-dump game.

Recently a project named BMJ that copies Filecoin’s decentralized storage concept has went bust as users report it a scam, which has led to the crypto exchange QBTC where most small POW coins including BMJ were listed halt services following a police investigation.