April was a whirlwind, and we turned an important page in our story by successfully executing our token sale. We brought on new hires — talented individuals who have already made an impact. Our exchange listings expanded, we previewed exciting new Sia features, and just had an overall fantastic month.

In this update

TSO results New team members Developer’s Corner The Exchange Situation By the numbers

TSO Results

First up this month are the results of our Tokenized Securities Offering!

Sia has long been one of the leanest projects around. We’ve run on a tight budget for a long time, and have one of the most advanced projects in the blockchain space to show for it. The Sia Storage Platform is also one of the most actively developed projects — and that’s been with only three developers and the contributions of our amazing community.

With this capital we’ll immediately expand the dev team. In fact, we’ve already hired our fourth developer Matt and brought on Jacob to assist with Nebulous operations (more on them soon).

We learned a ton during this process. And now we’ve got a working platform for fully regulated securities offerings in our pocket that we can use again in the future, or sell to others looking to do things the right way.

We plan to make two additional developer hires in the coming weeks. This means that, with the addition of Matt, our development team will soon be double what it was as recently as March. We’re confident that the pace of development will significantly increase, and we couldn’t be more excited about what the future will bring.

New team members

Jacob comes to us with experience in operations and hardware design. Formerly of Formlabs, creator of 3D printers, he’s already made an impact on the team in his short time here. Jacob has been assisting with both Sia and Obelisk operations, but his hardware experience has proven especially valuable in the run up to the launch of the SC1 and DCR1 ASICs.

Matt also joins the team as our newest developer! He’s a skilled developer who is incredibly excited about the blockchain space. He is looking forward to bringing his project management and team leadership experience from his previous jobs to the Sia team.

Matt’s already made his first code contribution to the Guide to Contributing to Sia, and you can see the details here.

You can find them both under the Sia Core Team group in Discord as Jacob and Sevey, respectively.

Updates from the…

Over the past month, 4 Nebulous repos were updated. 35 issues were closed, 6 were created, and 29 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.

Development Roadmap

Nebulous cofounder and Sia core developer David Vorick recently released a roadmap for Sia development that takes us through 2018 and most of the foreseeable future. I encourage you to read the whole post, but I think some standout topics are the official API support for video streaming in v1.3.3, file backups as the goal for 1.3.4, and David’s microchain on-chain scalability solution.

New features

Rollback

In the event of an internal error in the wallet it will roll back to its previous state. This is not user accessible but should provide a more robust Sia wallet.

Additional logging

Added to a few of the Sia packages to help track down bugs and offer greater visibility to the users.

io.ReadSeeker

Chris merged in his io.ReadSeeker interface which enables video streaming with long load times.

Contract fees

Now expressly shown in the /renter API endpoint and siac renter commands. Users can now see how how their spent allowance breaks down with amount spent on storage , upload , download , and fees

Better host contract info

GitHub user nielscastien spent a lot of time adding a new API endpoint to view host contract information.

They also added new functionality into the siac command to view details about host contracts. This is a significant feature that many hosts have been asking for and will be official released in Sia v1.3.3.

Contributors

ChrisSchinnerl, lukechampine, davidvorick, mtlynch, nielscastien, MSevey, 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

Our exchange options have never looked better. Over the past couple of weeks Bittrex has added a new trading pair, Siacoin to USDT. Upbit has activated the Siacoin to KRW (Korean Won) pair as well as enabled their SC wallet for deposits and withdrawals!

Poloniex’s wallet is down as of this writing (edit: it’s back up), and we’re working to get more info from them on the status there. HitBTC is waiting on a specific PR regarding offline transaction signing to get merged and released before they’re willing to bring their Siacoin wallet online. No other exchange has asked for that, but that’s what they want. Expect additional delays there.

The list

By the numbers

Two big milestones for our numberphiles out there! Our Twitter account is comfortably over 100,000 followers, and YouTube reached its first 1,000 subscribers. Our community growth has slowed in a number of areas, particularly Reddit, Discord, and Facebook, which is a reflection of the overall industry. In the run up to the end of the year and as Bitcoin neared $20,000, we saw a 40–60% month over month growth in some of these channels. The growth of our community has largely mirrored the growth of the industry as a whole, but as we continue to make bold moves and develop our platform I think we’ll see less coupling from industry standards in this regard.

The reception to our YouTube channel has been wonderful! Thanks to everyone has taken some time to check those videos out.

It’s time to…

With the token sale behind us and a development roadmap ahead of us, we’re well prepared to launch into the middle months of 2018. Our company and project will continuously evolve, but the constant for us is you. Our community remains a pillar of Sia.

We’ll continue to work on stuff. We’ll break things, fix them, make more mistakes, and release awesome new features. Sia continues to be the only fully decentralized storage platform in the business, and that is both an honor and priviledge that we take very seriously.

Steve