Spring really brought out the best in us. Hot off the heels of our April 1.4.0 release, the Sia team has been making great progress on 1.4.1 and the features that come with it. The Sia network itself hit a storage milestone, and the community was incredibly active with big announcements from new and existing teams, and single contributors.

Everyone makes a difference for Sia. Our team was only two or three developers for years — we’ve always operated lean. When you try the software, answer someone’s question on Reddit or Discord, or provide feedback to our devs, you’re making Sia better for all of us. Now, learn how Sia got better in May.

In this update

New highs Developer’s Corner Luke adds Fuse From the community

New highs

The Sia network reached a record in May, having 310 TB of data stored on the decentralized cloud. This number is still climbing, and as of this writing is over 325 TB.

Image courtesy of SiaStats.info

That number will likely continue to fluctuate — as Sia has released new features, more people (including our own team) are doing testing with their files. But it also shows impressive growth and trust in a network that is truly coming into its own.

Updates from the…

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

New features

Major work was done this month in favor of 1.4.1, the first update to Draco and the release of Sia that will bring seed-based file recovery to light. This will take the current backup method and tie it to your seed, which means a single string of words is all you’ll need to ensure your files can be recovered at any time.

Scale it up

We’ve been conducting some scalability tests lately. Right now, a Sia node is good to store over 5 TB of data, but not too much more. We’re really happy to say that v1.4.1 of Sia should be able to handle over 15 TB of data easily. This is our first step in a long line of future capacity improvements.

Global ratelimits

This will allow a renter to set bandwidth limits for Sia. It will help users with limited internet connections or data caps.

Loose ends

Here’s a collection of other things being worked on now or added in 1.4.1: handling file replacement during a backup recovery, financial metrics after a contract recovery, better handling what the renter does when a host hits its max capacity, health reporting of seed-based snapshots, and improving the RAM footprint for renters

Looking ahead

Chris has been working on partial uploads, a feature for 1.4.2 that will allow for renters to just upload the changes of a file, instead of the whole thing, after each file modification.

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.

Luke adds Fuse

Luke Champine updated his us library to allow FUSE capabilities. Thanks to this, a local directory connected to Sia can be mounted on the system, enabling operations as for example direct torrent downloads to Sia hosts or uploading data to internet directly from them. It also handles small files and document edits better, by bundling them before sending them to Sia.

From the community

Two new S3-compatible API projects, both built on Sia, launched in May. Filebase and Goobox both allow you to easily store files backed by the decentralized cloud. No messing with crypto, no waiting for a blockchain to sync.

These projects both represent promising futures for apps built on Sia, and both offer free accounts with a limited amount of data. Give them a try!

Community member Rezant released an online troubleshooting tool for hosts on SiaCentral that attempts to connect to the host and verifies its correct configuration. This is an awesome tool to help you work through tough issues when setting up a host.

Tbenz had two nice contributions to Sia, a proof of concept script for storing security camera footage on Sia, and Siasync, an app that lets you specify a local folder that will automatically sync its contents to the network.

It’s time to…

We’re approaching the halfway point for the year, and we’ve already made significant improvements to Sia under and over the hood. The rest of the year should bring enhancements that make Sia truly viable for wide spread use. Sia’s getting easier to use, while providing the same unparalleled level of privacy and security that it always has.

Steve