This update is going to cover the last two months for Sia. I didn’t post one last month because I didn’t want to crowd out the amazing updates that were coming out when this blog would have posted.

The volume and quality of news to come from our team over the past two months is unprecedented for followers of Sia. We’ve never seen anything like this either — we’re just incredibly excited about what we’ve accomplished and what the future holds for us.

Between another big-feature release with the launch of v1.4.1, a fundraising announcement, two new team members and more, we’ve got positive momentum that will carry us through the end of 2019 and well beyond.

June 6th was Block Day, marking the fourth anniversary of the genesis block being mined on the Sia network. Four years. And work had already been poured into Sia well before that as well. Most projects don’t make one year, at least not with serious development behind them. Sia has a track record — that’s why we’ve got one of the best projects in the blockchain space, and the absolute best community to back us.

In this update

New team members! Nebulous’ successful fundraise Sia v1.4.1 is released Sia on mobile Welcome to Sia Zach’s blog post The Sia team AMA Thoughts on our roadmap Our busy community

New team members!

Over the past two months, we’ve brought on two new members to the Sia family. Manasi Vora joins us as Sia’s Head of Product Strategy, and Marcin Jachymiak comes on as Sia’s newest core developer.

Manasi

She has been very active in the Boston blockchain community and most recently led the MIT Bitcoin Expo. Manasi comes with a unique mix of engineering and business background, and we are excited for her to begin her journey at Nebulous.

As Head of Product Strategy, Manasi will be focused on growing and improving the Sia network. She will be approaching this from all angles, including working with our amazing developer community, introducing Sia to other online communities, and doing more traditional enterprise business development.

Marcin

He recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree from MIT in computer science with a minor in mathematics. Marcin is very active in the Bitcoin space, having served as President of the MIT Bitcoin Club, interned at Chaincode Labs, and worked as a researcher at MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative.

Marcin may sound familiar, because he interned with Sia in summer 2017! He will be hitting the ground running as a Sia Core Developer, and is looking forward to improving Sia’s peer-to-peer networking system and making Sia usable in many more applications across the web.

Nebulous’ successful fundraise

Nebulous is thrilled to announce that we have raised $3.25 million dollars led by Bain Capital Ventures and supported by other powerhouse investors, enabling us to hire more technical and business superstars to further Sia’s utility and adoption.

We’ve issued a full press release, and make sure to stay tuned for more exciting news. We’ve also been featured on CoinDesk!

Sia v1.4.1 is released

On July 3rd, we released Sia v1.4.1. This release brought a number of big updates to the already impressive Draco. Download 1.4.1 now to get access to seed-based file recovery, allowing you to backup and restore your files using just your Sia seed. Take advantage of Sia’s new scalability improvements and upload over 20 TB of data to the network. Or turn off the lights and use Sia-UI’s new dark mode, a beautiful take on decentralization.

We put together a fantastic promotional video for v1.4.1.

And check out our Product Engineer Eddie’s guide to seed-based file recovery, one of the biggest features that Sia has ever released.

Frequent community contributor tbenz9 put together some release stats for this version.

93 days between v1.4.0 and 1.4.1 (a new version of Sia is released on average every 73.6 days)

between v1.4.0 and 1.4.1 (a new version of Sia is released on average every 73.6 days) Sia version 1.4.1 included 930 new commits into the Sia repository (and many other commits into other Sia-related repositories such as Sia-UI)

into the Sia repository (and many other commits into other Sia-related repositories such as Sia-UI) 10 commits/day since the previous release

since the previous release 324 Files were modified, with 16223 additions and 8405 deletions

On April 1, 2019 (the date of the 1.4.0 release) — 193 TB of used storage on Sia

On July 3, 2019 (the date of the 1.4.1 release) — 438 TB of used storage on Sia, a 127% upgrade

Sia is getting bigger in lots of ways. It’s time to store your data on Sia now. Download it here.

Sia on mobile

The first ever upload to and download from the Sia network on a mobile device — without running a full node on the phone — has been accomplished! Click here to see Danger and Nemo’s proof of concept demo for using Sia on iOS.

Welcome to Sia

Danger was involved in another great effort, with the posting of the first in a series of articles teaching users absolutely everything about the Sia network. Check it here.

Zach’s blog post

I know you miss Zach’s old tri-annual updates, but now you can get a dose of his writing with an important blog post detailing why Sia is the most viable non-financial application of blockchain technology in the world.

The blockchain industry deserves to see useful, scalable, and realistic applications. Sia’s team will continue to set a strong example.

Check out the post now, and let us know what you think.

The Sia team AMA

The Sia team did an AMA to talk about the release of 1.4.1 and our fundraising announcement. We answered questions about current development, the future of Sia, and our favorite TV networks.

Read the AMA.

Thoughts on our roadmap

Sia core dev Matt recently wrote about our roadmap — what’s on there, what we’ve been working on, and what’s next. It’s a great read and showcases what you can expect for Sia in the short and long term. Check it out.

Our busy community

Third-party projects will be a critical component of Sia in the future. Actually, they have been for a while now. We provide the infrastructure, you provide the apps on top of it.

We’ve begun incorporating some of the best and most tested apps and tools on the downloads page for Sia. It’s not just so we can show off — which is totally part of it — but it’s so that everyone who goes to get Sia knows that there is a large community of passionate users building things that make Sia better.

We might even have more ways to showcase these in the future. For now, send me a message if you’ve built something great and we’ll see about getting it on the site.

It’s time to…

I sure say this a lot, but I’m amazed at the work we’ve done — sometimes even more so at the work our community does, and incredibly proud to be a part of the Sia team. We’ll be back next month with even more to offer, hopefully some new faces to get to know, and even more work done as we progress towards version 1.4.2.

If you’re interested, follow along with the development for 1.4.2 on GitLab. That link will give you access to the 1.4.2 release tracker, and you can see all the code that gets merged and issues that get closed. Have a great August, and be sure to stop by Discord to say hi!

Steve