We’re opening up the second half of the year with some big moves on the dev side and the support side of the Sia network. We’ve got a new home for our code, new features deployed and better ones on the way, and lots of great ways to get help with Sia.

I’ve been known to ramble every now and then, so I’ve tried to condense our topics a bit and provide links to expanded info when relevant. Read on!

In this update

Our move to GitLab Developer’s Corner Sia v1.3.4 An important article Support Center The Exchange Situation By the numbers

Our move to GitLab

This month we finalized the transfer of Sia development from GitHub to GitLab. While Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub factored into our decision, GitLab has shown a committment to open source, self-hosting, and maintaining a wonderful ecosystem of features that will be the foundation upon which we build Sia for years to come.

Sia lead dev David Vorick posted about the move, our reasoning, and what GitLab has to offer us on the Sia Blog.

Updates from the…

Over the past month, 3 Nebulous repos were updated. 26 issues were closed, 31 were created, and 36 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.

Notable updates

Note: Some links still refer back to GitHub, where they were first merged. August will be our first full month in GitLab, and the links will reflect that.

Eddie has refreshed the UI to work with the Sia branding, and worked on backend UI things like displayed estimated costs when a renter is forming an allowance.

Chris handled a lot of migration tasks and improved the way download speeds are reported.

Matt added a way to link the new and the old file contract after a renewal, by adding the new fields RenewedFromContractID and RenewedToContractID .

Luke announced the alpha release of a Sia app for the Ledger Nano S hardware wallet.

David worked on optimizations to file downloading, including the removal of an unnecessary one second delay and new error handling functions.

Wincss corrected a bug that occurred when Sia reads persistent objects ( .json files) with a manual checksum.

Jkawamoto fixed a type mismatch in the renter API.

Tbenz9 fixed some misspellings and tested out the new GitLab workflow.

Contributors in July

Luke, David, Chris, Matt, and Eddie from the core team. Tbenz9, wincss, and jkawamoto contributed from the community.

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.

Sia v1.3.4

Sia version 1.3.4 is on its way. The team put out two release candidates for this version and seem confident with the stability and progress. The full release of 1.3.4 will feature improvements for renters, faster downloads, more correct renter spending tracking, and several new API endpoints for developers.

An important article

Discord mod and Siastats.info operator Hakkane recently published an investigative post detailing Bitmain’s secret mining. Though they publicly claim not to, ample evidence is provided linking Bitmain to mining on the Sia network using secretly developed ASICs, which were then sold to the general public once competition was announced. This thorough analysis is the first of its kind in the industry. Read it all here.

Support Center

There’s been an increasing trend over the years for consumers to attempt to solve issues on their own. Sometimes you really need a human touch, but more often than not you probably find yourself googling for existing resources in hopes of getting an answer quickly.

It’s undeniably to the point where any modern tech company needs to have a comprehensive self-service support center. When I say comprehensive, I mean that a vast majority (greater than 90%) of processes and issues should have detailed documentation.

We’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer every month. I want to share some metrics from our support center with you to show how helpful our updated articles has been.

For the month of July, Sia’s support center had:

5,845 article views

73 emails sent in after first checking the support center

4,044 avoided emails due to answers found

Nearly 6,000 article views is impressive, especially as it’s a 53% increase over the previous month. Though I’m actually more excited about the number of emails sent in. That’s the 73 shown above, and represents users who first checked the support center for an answer, but couldn’t find what they needed and then contacted us using the built in tool. This is an 80% drop from the prior month, and shows that our support center is making large leaps very quickly towards efficient information delivery.

Now that last stat, avoided emails, is an estimated number from our backend provider HelpDocs. They have a formula used to calculate this, but personally I think it skews high. Regardless, we’ve made significant strides towards getting thousands of users helped as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The Exchange Situation

June was such a big month for Siacoin, as we saw it listed on Binance and OKex. July followed up with some exciting additions as well.

New options include EasyRabbit and Bitit, two exchanges that fall into the minimal-interface, ease-of-use type. Find their links, and the entire list of places to get Siacoin, below.

The list

By the numbers

YouTube saw a 5% jump in subs, while Facebook added 6% to its likes. Twitter, Reddit, and Discord saw much smaller gains, thanks to the larger crypto bear market as well as the usual summer lull. User activity in these areas hasn’t been affected in a tangible way, as most channels are as busy as they’ve ever been.

It’s time to…

I don’t have much to say down here this month except thank you. Thank you for being one of the best communities in the crypto space, for creating positive experiences and tools, and for constantly pushing us. This road is rarely smooth, but it leads to a great place.

Steve