The past two months of activity on Sia have been impressive. We had another release, more community updates, a new hire, and new all-time highs. We met with our community, got listed on Kraken, and entered into a settlement with the SEC over our previous Siafunds offering.

Used storage on the Sia network increased from 476 TB on September 1 to 672 TB on October 31. That’s a 41% increase over two months, and represents one of our largest increases in such a short period of time. Used storage won’t always go up every day — sometimes large nodes will shut down and the many TB they store will expire. But it should trend up over time, and that’s something we’ve been seeing for years now.

In this update

SEC Settlement Our newest developer Dev updates Community Spotlight Built with Sia The exchange situation Scams targeting Sia users

SEC Settlement

Our two-token model and the timeline of events

This was significant news that we think will be great for the Sia network. We entered into a settlement with the SEC for our 2014 sale of Siafunds (our revenue-share security token), and the SEC took no enforcement action against Siacoins or any current activity on the Sia network.

While we are disappointed that the SEC chose to take action with respect to our relatively small offering conducted years before we had the benefit of guidance, we are pleased at how the Sia network fared under such intense regulatory scrutiny — and that after a thorough investigation, the SEC asserted no claims regarding Siacoins or the current operations on the Sia network. You can read the full press release and our FAQs.

Our newest developer

Please give a warm welcome to Sia’s newest Core Developer, Peter-Jan Brone aka PJ (@pjbrone in Discord)! He graduated with a Master of Science in Distributed Systems, after which he joined a large Belgian startup where he focused mostly on platform performance and scaling to make it enterprise ready.

He discovered blockchain in 2017, fell down the rabbit hole and then changed careers. He’s a long time member of both the Sia and Obelisk communities, and we are happy to announce that he is now also part of the Sia core development team!

As a Core Developer, PJ will mainly be focused on extending both the host and renter modules, with functionalities that will eventually make up the upcoming payment routing feature. Which in turn is a first step towards both filesharing and a full fledged CDN.

Updates from the…

Over the past two months, 95 new MRs were merged into the Sia codebase.

We released a hotfix, v1.4.1.2, on September 18. It includes improvements on file downloads, and fixes for the propagation of transactions on the network. Everybody is encouraged to update as soon as possible: https://sia.tech/get-started.

We will soon be releasing a release candidate for 1.4.1.3, and the most notable changes include better file contract management and reduced file contract churn. There should also be some performance improvements, and a more stable repair processes.

Other updates

The full list of Sia’s merged code can be found here, but these are some of the highlights from the month.

Chris added the allowance information to the backups that renters create from their metadata (and can later recover just using their wallet seed!). This will make easier and more intuitive to recover your renter, as your allowance will be set up automatically too.

David added logs to the repair process of files losing redundancy (the new repair.log file), what will help Sia users to get more detailed information about the repair process.

Community contributor tbenz9 extended the siac utility to include setting and retrieving bandwidth rate limits for the renter module and global bandwidth rate limits for the Sia daemon.

Community member Rishivikram Nandakumar added a new feature to siac renter setlocalpath that allows a user to update the localpath of a file being tracked by Sia.

The Sia team fixed a memory leak and race condition in the download code that may be affecting a small subset of users.

Marcin completed a sia-node-scanner that will scan the entire Sia network and record active nodes. This is not run by Sia itself, but is an additional tool to gauge the health and resiliency of the Sia network.

Community Spotlight

The Sia community is alive and well. Thriving, in fact. As I was preparing this list, I was amazed how many updates to existing apps and new releases went out in August.

Sia is open source and development is held on GitLab. Dozens of individuals have contributed either to the core code or apps built on top of the platform.

We have a wonderful community that we hope you’ll find your place in! Check the #contributors channel in Discord to say hi, ask questions, or get opinions on your Sia-related code or app.

Building Pixeldrain

We published a guest blog post from @Fornax about his experience building his file sharing site Pixeldrain, one of oldest projects in the Sia ecosystem. Thank you for your hard work, and for the insight to your process!

Sia Slice

Sia Slice , an app that allows you to maintain a mirror of a large file stored on the Sia network. The advantage of this app over other similar is that the file is split in chunks of 100MiB, so after making a change on the file, only the affected chunks will be uploaded. This allows cheap and fast syncing of large files that need to be frequently updated.

Roadie

Reddit member u/jav_rddt published Roadie : a tool for atomic swaps between the Sia and the Ethereum blockchains. This tool enables, for example, Ethereum dapp dvelopers to use Sia storage converting ETH (or ERC20 tokens) to SC without the need of an exchange.

Using Repertory

Community member @larsfloe wrote up a great article about his experience using Repertory, an app that lets you mount Sia as a drive on your computer. (Repertory created by @ScottG).

Repertory updates

The community member @ScottG released the alpha version 1.0.9 of Repertory. Repertory is an app that allows you to mount Sia storage as another drive on your computer. This version enables sharing these mounted drives across two Windows computers.

sia_exporter

Community member tbenz9 introduced sia_exporter: a lightweight and flexible metrics exporter to send Sia metrics to Prometheus for analysis and Grafana for graphing and alerting. Sia_exporter makes it easy to monitor one or many Sia instances using Prometheus, Grafana, and other tools.

sia-storage-pre-analyzer

Community member DaWe released sia-storage-pre-analyzer: a small script that calculates a given directory Sia size, average file size, etc.

Built with Sia

We announced a new “Built with Sia” brand that all 3rd party apps are encouraged to adopt. You can read the policy and view the assets here.

The Exchange Situation

Siacoins were listed for trading on Kraken! We’re incredibly excited that Kraken is now an option for our users.

Poloniex is ceasing US-trading on November 1, 2019 and will be allowing withdrawals until December 15, 2019 at the earliest. If this affects you, you should immediately move your Siacoins or any other assets on Polo to wallets you control.

This is a great time to mention that you should never store tokens or fiat in exchange wallets for long.

The List

Here’s the current list of exchanges that support Siacoin. We keep this up to date, but if you know of any additions or removals please let me know.

Scams targeting Sia users

Sia core team members and moderators are being impersonated on Discord and other channels, using a profile that appears identical to the original. No core team member or mod will ever contact you asking for SC, BTC, or any crypto to be transferred to them. We’ll also never prompt you to update your software via DMs.

Please ignore their requests and report these to me immediately.

It’s time to…

There’s only two months left in 2019, but we’re not even close to being done. We’ve already teased a new and exciting app, that we think will drive usage of the network, and provide unparalleled security and privacy for your media. We’ll have new updates to Sia, and even more on the horizon.

Thanks for sticking with us, and we’ll see you next month.

Steve