What We Have Been Working On

The Sia team works hard to keep our community updated with our development progress. We have weekly dev updates that are posted in Sia Discord Server, a YouTube channel SiaTV where we post community updates, and a Medium Blog where we post monthly updates.

Over the last year Sia has made some big improvements over 7 version releases (v1.3.3 through v1.4.1). One of the initial main goals of Sia was to be a reliable backup solution. That goal became a reality in v1.4.0 when we released metadata backups. In v1.4.1 we made the process even more streamlined with Seed-Based File Recovery. Sia is now a production ready, reliable backup solution.

Start uploading data today! https://sia.tech/get-started

Where Are We Going

Looking forward there are a lot of exciting features the Sia team is planning to work on.

Short Term

In the short term some of the key features that the team will be working on can be split into 3 groups:

User Experience Improvements

Developer Features

Infrastructure

User Experience

While the long term vision is for Sia to be the storage layer for the decentralized internet, we also want to create a great user experience for the individual user.

Paying for decentralized storage is complicated. Currently Sia users have an allowance with a number of different options to help find the best deal based on their storage requirements. Two of the main options are Period and Renew Window which deal with how long you want your storage contracts to last and how much of a buffer do you want for your contracts to renew in case your node is offline. One of our goals in the coming releases is to simplify the process so that it more closely mimics the monthly payment plans of today’s centralized data storage offerings. By making some small updates to how we define the Period and Renew Window, Sia users will soon be able to think about paying for decentralized storage in the same $/TB/Month that they are used to.

There is a lot of activity going on under the hood of Sia and it can be hard to figure out as a user when action is required. A new alert system is being developed that will help prompt users for action when needed in order to keep Sia running smoothly.

With partial chunk uploads users will be able to upload small files without having to pay for extra bits of data.

A big complaint for users has been that Sia uploads 40Mb chunks, which means any files smaller than 40Mb gets padding added. This in turn means that the users are paying for more data than they actually need. That will soon be a thing of the past as partial chunk uploads become a reality. With partial chunk uploads users will be able to upload small files without having to pay for extra bits of data.

Once continuous backups are implemented, these backups will happen automatically and users will never have to worry about losing their data or having an out of date backup.

The last piece of backup functionality is continuous backups. While users can recover all their data with just their seed, they still need to manually create backups. Once continuous backups are implemented, these backups will happen automatically and users will never have to worry about losing their data or having an out of date backup.

Developer Features

The Sia team knows how important third party development is to the long term success of the Sia network. Now that Sia is a fully functioning data storage platform we are ready to devote some more time and energy to developer resources.

One of the first things the team is going to tackle is creating README.md files for all the Sia modules. This is going to help developers better understand how Sia works so that they can develop faster and build the next generation of Sia applications.

a solid SDK library will help developers integrate their apps with the Sia API more seemlessly and with less effort

The other main focus with be developing an SDK library for Sia. We are always working to improve the Sia API and documentation and believe a solid SDK library will help developers integrate their apps with the Sia API more seemlessly and with less effort.

Infrastructure

To enable features we know Sia will need in the future the Sia team needs to work on implementing the right infrastructure now. Sia is made up of several modules (Renter, Host, Wallet, etc) and uses Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) at the protocol level to communicate between these modules to do things like upload and download data from Hosts. Two of the key RPCs that will be implemented in the coming releases are support for deleting data from contracts and support for modifying files previously uploaded to the Sia network.

Long Term

The more ways to interact with the Sia network and the easier it becomes to access data on the Sia networks the closer we get to our long term goal of being the storage layer for the decentralized internet. Two of the long term feature goals of Sia are to have file sharing and to enable multi-device file systems.

File Sharing

File sharing becomes really powerful when you realize files will be able to be shared with users not on the Sia network. This makes it possible to share a public URL that someone can open up in the web browser and stream a video.

Multi-Device File System

For some, multi-device means being able to use Sia on phones, tablets, laptops, etc. While that will be true, the real excitement comes from being able to access the same node and have all your data synced across all those devices.

The ability to share files on the Sia network and have multiple devices working off the same node offers a lot of interesting new possibilities for how people store and use data on Sia. To enable these features and more there is a lot of ground work that will need to come first. Some of the infrastructure that will be key are payment routing, eData routing, VPN, and Websocket RPCs.

What’s Next

Nebulous Inc, the company that employs the Sia Team, recently closed a $3.25 million pre-series A funding round; check out the article on CoinDesk. With this funding we will be able to nearly double the Sia team, hiring more developers and product roles. This team growth will help Sia continue to develop cutting edge features and increase network adoption. If you are interested in joining the team apply today!

We are excited about the future of Sia and look forward to the next generation of Apps built on Sia. Follow our progress on Trello!