It’s hard to say the last two months have been anything short of exciting. We released one of our most important updates ever. We’re making progress on our next big move. And we’ve never had better ways to get help.

Sia will be changing over the year. You’ll see new team members, new features, and a bigger community. The network will become more robust and flexible, and be able to do more things than ever.

What won’t change is our commitment to you, and to ourselves. Sia is the most private, most secure decentralized storage network on the market. In a world of breaches (how about at least 58 large scale, significant incidents this year alone?) securing your data has never been more important.

In this update

Sia releases 1.4.0 Developer’s Corner From the community Come work with us! Get supported

Sia releases 1.4.0

Meet Draco, our most important update yet

On April 1st (no jokes here), Sia released v1.4.0, codenamed Draco. It included a large number of updates, notably: file snapshot backups, eliminating any single point of failure; scalability improvements over 5 TB; and a completely redesigned UI.

This release also includes a number of updates that position Sia well for big improvements in the coming year. The rest of 2019 will bring good things for the network, and you can use these resources to learn more about 1.4.0 and get ready.

Community contributor tbenz9 wrote about the update.

Sia dev Eddie wrote up a guide to get started with Draco.

I updated our support center with over a dozen new and updated articles on 1.4.0, and created a new Sia User Guide section to guide you through getting started. We also have a snazzy looking video to introduce Draco to the world.

Updates from the…

Over the past two months, 78 issues were closed and 127 pieces of code were added to the core codebase. We have a snapshot of updates here, but tbenz’ and hakkane’s official updates can be found weekly in the #announcements channel in Discord.

Some stats on this release

(also courtesy of tbenz)

It’s been 167 days since the previous major release (version 1.3.6). Sia publishes a release on average every 71.7 days. The next release is targeting May 16th, 2019.

The 1.4.0 release consists of 1,274 code commits (this is excluding the UI and Nebulous’ other repositories which also saw significant development) or an average of 7.6 commits every day for the last five months.

Since the Sia 1.3.7 release: 276 files were changed, 32,012 lines of code were added, and 11,162 lines of code were deleted.

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.

From the community

We just published a guest blog post from community member Hakkane about his experience building on Sia. Learn how he built some of the best tools in the Sia ecosystem.

Learn about Decentralizer, a tool for managing who you form contracts with as a renter. And get caught up on Hosts Monitor, a deep-dive into host statistics and rankings based on the value they provide the Sia Storage Platform.

Come work with us!

We are excited to announce that Nebulous (the company building Sia) is now hiring for open positions! You can learn more at AngelList. Below is an overview of the available positions. If you are interested, please apply through AngelList.

- Sia Core Engineer (Boston, Zurich, remote)

- Integration Engineer (Boston, Zurich, remote)

- Full-Stack Web Developer (Boston, NYC, remote)

Please note: remote positions are limited to workers in timezones GMT-10 to GMT+2. These positions have also been up for a few weeks now, and a couple are in the process of being filled. We very much look forward to receiving your applications!

In addition to hiring, we published a new website for Nebulous that links to the Jobs page and our current projects. Check it out at https://nebulous.tech/

Get supported

Over the past three months, articles in the Sia support center have been viewed over 9,000 (vegeta.jpg) times. Over 700 searches were conducted on the site, and a few hundred emails to our support (or questions that ended up on Discord or Reddit) were avoided.

One of my next tasks will be to sort through the most searched terms on the support site and either edit our existing articles or write some new ones that cater to these asks.

The support center is an important part of our support strategy—to create an efficient and informative self-help solution for our users. As part of this ongoing effort, I urge you to check out some of our newest articles.

An overview of Sia-UI’s new wallet.

Setting a custom password.

Upload files to Sia.

Create your metadata backup.

Learn about Siafunds, the secondary token on the Sia network.

It’s time to…

We continue to make progress on the code, and we hope that 1.4.1 will be here soon. This next update brings true seed-based file recovery, an important feature that truly brings Sia’s use to a practical level.

In 1.4.1, Sia will take your files, encrypt them, and distribute them all over the world — ensuring true privacy and security. But it already did that. It will do it for cheaper than any other centralized service. But it already did that too. Now Sia eliminates the single point of failure and makes sure you can always recover your files from any computer in the world. When your data is in Sia, it’s the safest it’s ever been, for less money than you’ve ever paid.

Steve