May was the first full month with our four person development team, and we made great progress towards version 1.3.3 of Sia. Over the past month we’ve also hit a big milestone, significant updates to community projects were released, and a new free blockchain talk for folks in the Boston area was started by our team.

In this update

A download milestone Blockchain Bits Community Spotlight Developer’s Corner The Exchange Situation By the numbers

A download milestone

The Sia core software hit the 1,000,000 download mark in May of this year. This is an incredible milestone for any piece of software, especially from a team that was operating with at most three developers for over three years.

Because most users interact with Sia through Sia-UI, a lot of people forget that Sia-UI isn’t even our flagship product. A vast majority of development work has gone toward the actual Sia Storage Platform, and you can read about what development will look like for Sia as a whole here.

Sia-UI will be getting some major improvements this year, and we think you’ll be very happy with the changes.

Blockchain Bits

Blockchain Bits is a new weekly class in Boston covering intermediate-level, technical topics related to blockchain technology.

The class is hosted by local startup Nebulous, maker of Sia (decentralized cloud storage) and Obelisk (ASIC miners). Classes are typically 1 hour in length and include a structured presentation and Q&A, followed by unstructured discussion.

Past topics have included difficulty raising attacks, transaction malleability, one way payment channels, and transaction fee minimums.

Cost

FREE

When

Every Friday from 3:30p — 4:30p

Where

Underscore VC, Old City Hall (until our office is properly equipped)

45 School St Floor 2

Boston, MA 02108

Videos of each discussion will be posted to our YouTube channel, and links to the slides can be found here on Reddit.

Community Spotlight

SiaStats

Community project siastats.info from Discord moderator hakkane recently released a new full-featured explorer for the Sia blockchain. It includes smart breakdowns of transactions, bulk search, and host contracts reporting for the upcoming v1.3.3 host info expansion.

Goobox

Another community project called Goobox, a simplified front end for using the Sia network, just released v0.2.0 of their software. Updates include MacOS support and other fixes. As you can tell from the version number it’s still early software, but it’s also very promising and the dev team appreciates user feedback.

Updates from the…

Over the past month, 3 Nebulous repos were updated. 42 issues were closed, 8 were created, and 49 pieces of code were added to the core codebase. We have a snapshot of updates here, but tbenz’ official updates can be found weekly in the #announcements channel in Discord.

Three release candidates for Sia v1.3.3 were pushed this month, leading to what should be a smooth official 1.3.3 launch sometime in June.

Among the new features that will be released in the next version, you’ll find:

video streaming in the api

faster contract formation

improved host selection

lower contract churn

additions to the siac renter command that fully detail how your allowance has been spent

Contributors

ChrisSchinnerl, lukechampine, MSevey, DavidVorick, and tbenz9

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.

The Exchange Situation

As we made our community aware of earlier this month, Abucoins is closing. You may not have used this exchange — they ran low volume for lots of currencies, Siacoin included. But this is a lesson in the dangers of keeping your crpyto on exchanges. If you were out of the loop or missed the messages, you just might have lost a whole lot of money. That’s why we supplement official exchange messages with alerts across our platforms. Nothing replaces your own diligence though — make sure you’re checking in with your exchanges regularly to see their status.

As always, this list is not comprehensive, and not all of these exchanges will fit your trading needs. Additionally, we haven’t vetted all of them which is why we only officially recommend three in this list.

The list

By the numbers

Not much to say here except a big thanks to everyone who is active in their respective communities!

It’s time to…

June should bring new releases and great contributions. If you’re anything like me, you haven’t taken a full breath thanks to the brutal allergy season, so there’s something else to look forward to.

I hope you all have a great month, and reach out anytime for any reason.

Steve