June was another great month for Sia. We released 1.3.3, which brings decentralized video streaming to market. Great community projects kicked into gear — plugins for Sia, and a new group dedicated to testing the platform both launched. And there are now more places than ever to buy and trade Siacoin. Read on for the fabulous details.

In this update

Sia v1.3.3 Community Spotlight Eddie joins the team! Developer’s Corner The Exchange Situation By the numbers

Sia v1.3.3

Sia version 1.3.3 was launched! With it came decentralized video streaming, the first platform of its kind to offer such a feature.

We’re incredibly proud of this release. If you’re interested in testing video streaming, you can follow this tutorial. Among other updates were a large number of stability fixes, many of which followed from improvments to our testing infrastructure. We have moderately reduced the memory requirements of Sia, and moderately increased the scalability of Sia.

1.3.3 included @nielscastien’s API endpoint for hosts that reports information about contracts formed with renters.

A few days after the release of 1.3.3, the Sia team patched a bug with the transaction history list. If your wallet balance is correctly identifying transactions, but those transactions aren’t showing in your history, update to the latest.

You can also check out the full release notes.

Community Spotlight

SiaPlugins.com

Community members RBZL and Danger have launched SiaPlugins.com, the first ever repository for plugins to expand the functionality of Sia-UI. You can currently download plugins for dark mode, official links, and a wrapper so you can view the SiaSetup website within Sia-UI.

This is a very cool project and there are lots of possibilities here. Two great examples are the upcoming plugins Sia Companion and Sia Dashboard.

Sia Companion is an idea that Danger has been working on for a while. This plugin will provide tips and, most importantly, help automate some of the more cumbersome troubleshooting steps like deleting data folders and re-syncing the blockchain.

Sia Dashboard will offer one central place for all things Sia, including information on the network, mining, and other handy features.

While the plugins from this site can be considered safe, be careful if you download one from another source. A plugin could be used to compromise your wallet.

The Sia Test App Community

The Sia Test App Community is a group of volunteers with the goal of benchmarking the performance of each Sia release. Fornax, one of our Discord moderators, recently conducted their first test on Sia v1.3.3. The group is joined by mtlynch and backed by wskeen and the Sia Bounties group.

Check out their initial post on Reddit for more info!

Eddie joins the team!

Eddie Wang has joined the development team full-time! You might remember Eddie as one half of Luxor, the team behind one of Sia’s mining pools and the crew who built our redesigned website.

Eddie will be focusing on a handful of front-end tasks, one of which will be the complete overhaul and redesign of Sia-UI, our official app. I’ve had the chance to see a couple early concepts, and they look beautiful.

He’s @eddiewang in Discord, go say hi if you haven’t already.

Updates from the…

Over the past month, 2 Nebulous repos were updated. 29 issues were closed, 21 were created, and 35 pieces of code were added to the core codebase. We have a snapshot of updates here, but tbenz’ official updates can be found weekly in the #announcements channel in Discord.

The release of Sia v1.3.3 was the biggest news to be found here. Our next target is 1.3.4 (surprise) and we expect to be able to bring some great new features to the table.

Contributors in June

ChrisSchinnerl, lukechampine, MSevey, DavidVorick, eddiewang, and Fornax96.

A special thanks

I also want to thank @hakkane in Discord for covering the development updates for a couple weeks. They were similarly packed full of info and incredibly useful to the Sia 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.

The Exchange Situation

June was our best month yet for Siacoin on exchanges. We added two powerhouses – Binance and OKex. I’d like to thank the teams involved at both exchanges for their work in realizing Siacoin tradable pairs, and the Sia dev team for the advice they’ve offered in tandem.

What can you trade?

Binance offers SC/BTC, SC/ETH, and SC/BNB.

OKex offers SC/BTC, SC/ETH, SC/USDT, and SC/OKB.

The list

By the numbers

For those of you who enjoy seeing the digits tick up, I wouldn’t get too excited until the larger cryptocurrency market turns around. It’s no secret that buzz about the space is still largely tied to the price of the tokens, and with Bitcoin down 60% from the beginning of the year, many have decided to take a break.

Still though, the YouTube channel saw 13% growth month over month. Viewers consumed 180 hours of content from SiaTV, and our average view duration was up almost 20%. These are all good signs for our youngest outlet.

Twitter also ticked up nearly 3%, and the rest were flat.

It’s time to…

I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished in half a year, and I’m amazed at what our users have been working on. In the coming months we’ll see 1.3.4 and big updates to Sia-UI. It’ll be exciting times.

Steve