So it’s been a couple of months. First off, I want to thank you for your patience since the last Community Update. I’m happy to say that the reason we missed a month or two was because things were busy, we’ve all had our hands full, and we had plenty of updates going out besides these.

Still, expect things to return to normal here at the beginning of 2020. The last couple of months have brought incredible progress to Sia, and I don’t think it’s incorrect to say the latest release is the most important one we’ve ever put out.

v1.4.3 brings Skynet, which gives Sia file sharing and content distribution capabilities for the first time ever. We hired more developers, we made other incredible progress, and publicized new important integrations with Sia.

Let’s get to it.

In this update

Skynet SiaStream enters beta Our growing team Posts from the team In the media Community Spotlight The exchange situation Dev updates

Skynet

Skynet is here. File sharing. Content distribution. It’s a decentralized CDN for devs. It’s a permanent home for data and applications.

The coming of Skynet represents a turning point for the Sia team. We’ve spent much of the past 5 years saying the tech isn’t ready and that marketing will happen in due time. But today, I’m glad to announce: the tech is ready. - David Vorick, Sia lead dev and Nebulous co-founder

You can use Skynet from your own Sia node, or upload to Skynet from a webportal.

Uploading to Skynet

The most important command is the upload command:

siac skynet upload [localpath] [siapath]

This will return a skylink which you can put into any portal to see your file. That file will remain on Skynet for as long as you have the file in your own renter.

Pinning a file

If you are running your siad as a portal, it is also possible to pin other skyfiles using the command siac skynet pin [skylink] [siapath] . So long as at least one person is pinning a file, that file will be available on Skynet forever.

Skynet came packaged as part of Sia v1.4.3, our latest and greatest update to Sia. This update was mostly focused on adding Skynet functionality and laying the groundwork for future updates.

You can download 1.4.3 now, and head over to our support site to learn more about what Skynet can do.

SiaStream enters beta

SiaStream uses Sia to provide low cost media storage and fast video streaming.

SiaStream has entered beta, and in the coming months we’ll expand that beta to be open to all. For now, you can sign up to learn more at siastream.tech, and you’ll be part of our mailing list once we announce the next phase.

Take a peek

If you’re interested now, check out our SiaStream support center to start reading and learning about what our fantastic app can do.

Our growing team

We added three new team members over the past couple of months, all part of the EU-Sia team. Each team member introduced themselves in our Discord.

Marcin

Hi everyone, my name’s Marcin and I’m the newest member of the Sia team! I live in Warsaw and I’ll be working with the team in Europe as a Core Developer coding in Go. I previously worked for MaidSafe developing the Rust backend. I’m a strong believer in privacy, OSS, and the potential of crypto projects to provide freedom in a world faced with governmental abuse. My favorite language is Rust (so far — still learning Go!) and I’m an Emacs fanatic. Apart from that I enjoy fitness, traveling, music, cars, and other stuff. I’m really excited to be joining the project!

Karol

Hello everyone! My name is Karol and I am excited to announce that I just joined the Sia team as a fullstack developer. I will be responsible for our javascript codebase starting with SiaStream project. I am located in Warsaw, Poland and previously worked as a frontend engineer in Crunch.io on a data analysis web application. I am passionate about everything web related, React and its ecosystem, I love automating and simplifying processes and improving developer experience. I am thrilled to be a part of Sia and this community!

Ivaylo

Hi everyone, I’m Ivaylo and I just joined Sia as a Code Dev! I’m based in Zurich, Switzerland and I’ll be joining the European team with Chris, PJ and Marcin S. I’ve done a little bit of pretty much everything in the past — web development, Android apps, business software, SaaS, microservices. I’m super excited to be jumping into the distributed world and I’m looking forward to helping Sia take over the world! :) When not coding, I’m usually climbing, skiing, windsurfing or just hiking in the local mountains.

Posts from the team

David posted a wonderful introspective on the shape of the Internet, what it can mean to a person, and why we need to reclaim it from corporate oversight.

Nebulous co-founder Luke published a highly recommended blog post about the progress and adoption of the us library and its derived software during its first year. us is an alternative implementation of the Sia protocol that allows developers to interact at a very intimate level with the network. Luke analyzes the many software developments made by other developers on top of it and the future direction of the project.

Steve (hi) wrote an article showcasing the Alert System, one of Sia’s amazing new features that debuted in 1.4.2.0. Check it out and learn how Sia can tell you more!

Sia core dev Chris wrote about one of Sia’s lesser known capabilities — streaming 4k video content seamlessly.

Manasi put together a post about the Carbon and Siacoin integration. Now you can use your credit or debit card to purchase Siacoin with just a few clicks! Additionally, for all our app-developers you can use the Carbon widget/api to integrate this feature in your app.

In the media

David Vorick gave an interview to the Epicenter podcast. He discussed about the origins of the Sia project, the relevance of decentralized storage, David’s points on Proof of Work, and the hard fork of 2018.

Community Spotlight

Cloudly

@qhead teased his upcoming Cloudly app: a cross-platform cloud storage app aimed to create an experience akin to Dropbox. It allows folder syncing, sharing files between devices or with other people, and includes a built-in photo and video player. Try it now!

Sia Central

Nate announced the beta release of the Sia Central Lite Wallet: a wallet supporting regular 29-word seed wallets, Ledger devices and watch-only wallets. Its code is open source and the seed is stored locally, never leaving the device. Nate is looking for early feedback from testers before the general release.

SiaStats

Hakkane added a set of tools to SiaStats to facilitate accounting and tax reporting: better CSV reports of transactions, balance tracking for addresses, and a coin price tracking page and calculator.

Repertory

@ScottG released the 1.2.2 version of Repertory and 1.1.4 of Repertory-UI . Repertory is a desktop app that allows to mount your Sia storage as a local drive and share data between different computers. This version features Raspberry Pi 4 and CentOS 8 support together with bug fixes.

The exchange situation

Updates from the…

Our team is hard at work on 1.4.4, the first followup to the incredible Skynet. Here’s some notable updates from the past couple of months in the leaed up to 1.4.3.

Other updates

David added protections to renters from hosts using overly abusive prices. The threshold for considering the pricing to be an abuse is automatically calculated from the allowance of the renter, but the user can also optionally provide manual maximums.

Chris introduced optimizations on speed and memory usage for renters when the files are served directly from the local disk.

Matt fixed a bug on file repairs when starting Sia.

Marcin updated the watchdog that surveils the blockchain for events important for the renter to now keep track of expired contracts.

Luke replaced the database used by Sia, bbolt , by a customized version forked by the Sia developers. This will allow in the future faster updates and fixes, as it will not require the original developers to approve the changes.

PJ added a new feature for Sia: Ephemeral Accounts. One bottleneck of the protocol is that for each chunk of data that is transferred between the host and the renter, several round-trip messages must be exchanged previously to pay the operation. This results in an overhead of latency for data transfers. By creating an Ephemeral Account with a host, the renter can pre-pay a small amount, enough to pay a number of following file transfer operations, resulting in much faster and efficient uploads and downloads. This MR is also the foundation of several other future features of Sia, as file sharing.

Chris has made the wallet unlock and be able to generate new addresses instantly, thanks to making the wallet module of Sia functional even when it is still scanning the blockchain.

GitHub user shakamd contributed Python bindings to the us-bindings repo, allowing app developers to use us from Python!

It’s time to…

This has been a wonderful couple of months for Sia. Our team is growing and we’ve got incredible momentum. Skynet is powerful, and brings amazing functionality to the network.

You can expect great things in 2020. We’ll do our absolute best to deliver.

Steve