February never seems short ahead of time, but I’m always left wondering where the month went once March arrives. Unfortunately, while February is gone, it didn’t take the cold with it.

Despite the frosty temperatures, the Sia team made a lot of progress on v1.4.0, one of the biggest upgrades in looks and functionality that we’ve shipped in quite a while — maybe ever. Siacoin was also listed on the first big exchange of 2019, and Luke uncovered a vulnerability affecting almost every hardware wallet out there. Read through for all the updates from this past month.

In this update

Take our survey! An update on 1.4.0, our next release Developer’s Corner Luke finds a major hardware wallet vulnerability The Exchange Situation

The Sia Annual Survey

The second annual Sia Survey is here! We used the first — over a year ago — to learn about how you want to communicate with us, and made a ton of substantial changes because of that.

This time we’re looking for feedback on the platform and how you use it. Your answers could help chart the course for Sia in the coming months and years!

Take the survey here.

Updates on Sia v1.4.0

Work on our next major release of Sia is progressing well. At the time of this writing, we’re two release candidates deep and getting ready to put the third out into the world.

1.4.0 will include easier backups, an overhauled UI, and will pave the way for more big changes to Sia this year.

A sneak-peek of the upcoming Sia-UI overhaul

Updates from the…

Over the past month, 49 issues were closed and 84 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 features

| Chris finished a new API endpoint that allows a user to create and restore a backup of their .sia files

| Matt finished a new RecentRepairTime metadata timestamp that’s used to record when a file was repaired. This helps Sia decide which files are highest priority to repair and should improve the reliability and performance of file repairs

| Chris polished bugs related to the recovery of contracts from a backup that 1.4.0 will feature

| New pricing fields were added to the API and siac . minbaserpcprice and minsectoraccessprice are two new fields that allow a host to set prices for a renter to execute host rpc calls and access specific sectors

| Chris made the recently added commands that allow renters to create and recover manual backups of their metadata to be used on the command-line version of Sia, siac

| Luke fixed a bug that affected 1.4.0 RC versions on Windows: files are now properly closed before deleting them

| Matt fixed a bug about the health of 0-byte files, and another bug regarding stuck files

| Luke fixed the incorrect path of the API password

| David and Chris corrected bugs about the migration of the legacy renter metadata to the new .sia format

| Eddie has been powering through the new Sia-UI overhaul. Those updates don’t get fed through the Sia repo, but you’ll be able to see his hard work once 1.4.0 releases.

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 finds a major hardware wallet vulnerability

While developing our Ledger app, Sia developer Luke Champine discovered a vulnerability affecting most hardware wallets. The vulnerability was disclosed responsibly and has been fixed by Ledger and Trezor.

Compromised computers can lie about what they send and what they receive, so it’s the responsibility of the device (and the user) to detect those lies. Unfortunately, I discovered that most hardware wallet apps fail to follow this rule of thumb. Specifically, during address generation, they fail to display a crucial piece of information that I refer to as the key index. Most users are not even aware that these key indices exist, much less how important they are

Read more here.

The Exchange Situation

Siacoin was listed for trading this month on Huobi, our first big exchange integration of 2019! Siacoin can be traded against BTC and ETC. Learn more in Huobi’s official announcement.

The List

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

It’s time to…

Warm up with March, and with Sia. Stay tuned for the upcoming release of 1.4.0 and stay with us for all the great things we’ve got planned for the year. See you next month!

Steve