A lot has happened over the last month at Sia. We announced new integrations, expanded our team, and saw the launch of new user contributions. Our Twitter account just breached 40,000 followers, Reddit is up over 16,000, and our Discord server will be hitting 5k in the coming days. You guys are knocking it out of the park and we’re happy to have a place for our users among the most popular platforms out there.

You may have seen some of this if you follow Sia on social media. If you’re in Discord, you’re about as close as you can get without being in the office with us. Discord users probably knew about Chris joining the team a few days ago, and oftentimes other bits of info trickle through there first. If you’re not in yet, join now.

Stay tuned to the end. I’ve got some results I’d like to share with you from the survey included in the last update.

Chris Schinnerl joins the team

Zach Herbert, VP of Operations, recently announced the newest member of the Sia core team.

“We are thrilled to announce that Chris Schinnerl has officially moved to Boston this week to join Sia as our newest core developer. We’re incredibly happy to have him on the team. Chris comes to us from Austria. He learned to code while in high school and developed an interest in open source software around the same time. He studied Computer Science at Graz University of Technology, achieving his undergrad degree while working as a software engineer for AVL List. Once Chris learned about the idea of decentralized storage, he was hooked. A few Siacoin and a full node later, he began contributing to the project. Chris spent a few months submitting fixes and features via Github, and enough of these were merged with the core code that the team started to take notice. One short hop across the Atlantic, and Chris met the Sia team in August of this year. We’re absolutely excited to see where Chris helps Sia go over the next few months and years. Stray facts: Chris became a trained medic for the Red Cross before attending university, and he once did a summer internship in Hong Kong.”

I’ve talked to Chris a bit since he joined. He’s enthusiastic and friendly, and more importantly he’s passionate about Sia. But that’s pretty easy to tell when someone is willing to move across an ocean to work with you.

Chris is active in Discord. Go say hi when you get a chance.

Contributor Spotlight — The Luxor Mining Pool

This month, our Contributor Spotlight shines on a company that wants to make it easier to integrate with Sia.

Mine Siacoin and help fund Sia development.

Our friends at Luxor Tech have introduced the Luxor mining pool, the newest pool available for Sia.

They say it best. “We’re on a mission to make it easier for businesses and developers to build applications on top of Sia.” Luxor is also working on a lite wallet for Sia, and we’re excited to see what they can do in the future.

They’re also the first mining pool to give back to Sia. 10% of pool profits are donated to the dev team.

If you mine Siacoin and want to contribute to two great companies at once, check them out.

Keeping tabs on Sia

One of our hardest working community members developed a website called SiaStats. It’s a fantastic resource for seeing a variety of info from the Sia network like the number of daily transactions, total number of contracts, and more.

Here’s a couple of cool things I learned while checking it out:

There have been over 6.2 million transactions on the blockchain.

We’re approaching 70,000 active storage contracts.

Thanks to @hakkane on Discord for putting together such a useful site.

Sia in the news

I’ll drop some articles here from the past month that mention Sia in some capacity. If you see Sia being talked about in the media, send it my way.

Explaining the new cryptocurrency bubble — and why it might not be all bad. — Ars Technica

The New Internet Bubble: Meet The Young Entrepreneurs Riding Out The Crypto-Craziness — Forbes

Duplicati Users Can Now Back Up Files on the Sia Network — The Merkle

Duplicati Integration

I briefly touched on Sia’s second bounty for Duplicati last update, but it was still very fresh.

The Duplicati integration combines an easy to use UI with Sia as an available storage location. It allows you to back up any folder from your computer directly to the Sia network.

This option is available to all Duplicati users, and Zach put together an extensive setup guide.

The Community Survey

At the end of the last update I offered a brief survey for you to fill out. I wanted to get your thoughts on Discord, last month’s post, and what you want to see from us in the future.

I was excited to see that 95% of respondents enjoyed the first community update. And unsurprisingly, the main thing you want to see is more news. The crypto business moves quick, so I get it. Any info that I’m able to share will always be included.

91% of responses said that the Discord experience has been good so far. We put a lot of work in a short period to make sure the server was a place worthy of your time.

One thing that you said would make the community experience better is resources. Now that I’ve settled into my role as Community Manager, I’m going to be focusing on making sure that our tools and materials are accurate and easy to use.

The wrap up

That’s it folks! Thanks for sticking around to the end. I expect the cadence for the update will continue to be mid-month. As always, don’t hesitate to reach out for any reason.

Links referenced in this post

Twitter • Reddit • Discord

Luxor • SiaStats • Duplicati integration

Steve