I hope you all had a fantastic February. We’ve got a lot of news to recap, big and small. The team was busy getting our Siafund TSO site launched and working on 1.3.2. Zach has been supporting just about everything and everyone, and I’ve been working to get our support teams moved over to a new system, as well as a couple other things I think you’ll really enjoy. We’re taking all of this energy and momentum and moving forward as purposefully and methodically as we can. On with the show!

In this update

Announcing: The TSO Community Spotlight How Sia supports our users Developer’s Corner By the numbers (and staying safe on social media)

Announcing: The TSO

Sia’s biggest news in a long time is up first. We are excited to announce that Nebulous is raising funds to sustain Sia development through the sale of Siafunds, in what we call a Tokenized Securities Offering.

The Private Placement Memorandum defines all the terms of the sale and gives some great examples of how the actual process (which is more like an auction than a sale) will work. Our brand new Siafunds FAQ, accessible from the site, explains some of this in easier to read terms.

We’ve got a new website to support this endeavor — Siafunds.tech, and an investor relations team that you can send an email to if you have any questions. Thanks to Luxor for building our TSO site!

Community Spotlight

SiaStats

Next up is a site you’ve probably seen here before. SiaStats has received a makeover on the outside and under the hood! Already one of the best tools out there for monitoring Sia Storage Platform statistics, the site now looks better and loads faster than ever, and has a mobile-friendly design. Credit goes to the ever humble hakkane (on Discord) for building it, and m_rom and raffy_p for design input on the new look.

SiaSetup

We also have a brand new resource that has been very well received by the community. Discord user RBZL has created SiaSetup.info, an excellent site filled with guides on how to get set up with using the wallet, renting space, hosting data, and just about everything else.

It’s a great tool for anyone, whether you’re brand new to Sia or just need a refresher. Go check it out now.

If you have any suggestions for future community spotlights, send me a message. My contact info is at the bottom of this post.

How Sia supports our users

I take support very seriously. It is in my job title after all. Good service and support will make or break any interaction with a company, and we make our judgements regarding quality of service quicker than ever.

So I guess I just help everyone individually, right? Not quite.

Sia has a big community, and only one of me. Fortunately, I’m backed by two excellent support personnel on the Sia side, and Obelisk has two dedicated and fantastic folks as well. But since we have over 160,000 users across our social channels alone, and nearly 1,000,000 total wallet downloads, we outsource a bit of that support to the #help channel in Discord. This is essential, and my thanks goes out to everyone who lurks there waiting for a question they can answer.

Q uality self-help is important

Our official support channels, which consist of the Sia Knowledge Base and email address, are designed to complement each other. Self-help has become mandatory for modern support systems, and this site will evolve to be a fully-featured center to get help with anything across the Sia ecosystem. This new site has already paid off — over the past week alone, just under 1,100 articles have been viewed, and we’ve avoided an estimated 480 emails. Our single most-viewed article?

“Does Sia have an official wallet?” has pulled 180 views itself in the last week. That’s 180 instances of a user’s time saved, and 180 instances where that question didn’t wind up coming to our email or being asked in Discord. Or worse yet, going unanswered.

I promised an article about my plans for my new position, and I’ll deliver on that — some things (everything) just got in the way. Stay tuned.

Updates from the…

To recap the month in Github: 47 issues we closed, 14 issues were created, and 47 news pieces of code were merged into the core codebase.

The Download Overhaul has been completed and merged. This overhaul improves memory management, introduces a new feature called “Overdrive” for faster downloads (at a higher price), and sets the framework for features such as partial downloads and better latency for small files. Initial reports indicate that Sia can now get a sustained download speed of over 500Mb/s when conditions are right.

1.3.2 is currently in release candidate (RC) and is being tested by the core team and those in the #contributors channel of Discord. Keep in mind, any RC version of Sia-UI may be unstable.

As always, you can follow the weekly dev updates in the #announcements channel on our Discord server, courtesy of the wonderful tbenz9.

And speaking of, tbenz recently helped the core team revise the roadmap into the Sia Feature Roadmap. It will be updated as part of the weekly development update, and a Sia core developer will review the roadmap after every Sia release.

Becoming a contributor

If you’re interested in contributing to the Sia codebase, there are a number of issues waiting for community development. Please read the Guide to Contributing To Sia and comment on any issues you plan to work on.

By the numbers (and staying safe on social media)

Movement on all of our social platforms was strong, but this always represents a double-edged sword. With increased popularity means increased attention from scammers. This section will contain a few tips to help you stay fraud-free in your times on Sia’s social media.

Here we have a scam Twitter account, dressed up just like our official account and responding to one of our tweets. Many of you would look at this and quickly realize we’re not giving away over $400,000, but this stuff keeps getting posted because eventually it works.

Seriously, this stuff works. And people from all backgrounds and technical experience fall for it.

There’s other signals here, even for those less familiar with Sia. Our official Twitter account is SiaTechHQ, without the underscore. Clicking through to view the scammer’s profile would have shown that they had 2 followers as opposed to our nearly 100,000.

Now this particular Twitter account has since been suspended, so we can’t see the responses to this tweet. They were all from fellow scam accounts, claiming “how great the process to get free ETH!” was.

Turning our attention to Discord, please be cautious of any user offering to escrow transactions. If you pursue this, verify that the account of the person you are speaking with is the account of a trusted user in this regard.

Your best defense in a world with endless scams is to assume that everything is a scam until you prove otherwise.

Join Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Discord

The wrap up

Thanks for reading! March should see the launch of the auction for the Siafunds TSO, the release of 1.3.2, and continued improvement for our support options. Our community is growing and contributing in new and fantastic ways, and so will our company. As always, reach out with any questions or concerns.

Steve