The State of Sia, December 2023

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The Sia Blog

6 min readDec 7, 2023

It’s a new month, and with that comes our final edition of The State of Sia for the year

As the Foundation continues the march toward the V1 releases of renterd, hostd, and walletd, we are focused on continuing to refine and add any final touches before the code freeze. We have also officially launched the Anagami testnet and have begun bug testing in preparation for the upcoming hard fork.

It was a slow month for new grants, with IPFSR being the only one approved. Sia Satellite has released support for client-side data encryption, file packing, and now offers the option to directly upload to a satellite, allowing users to save on bandwidth and cost. Further updates on ongoing developments from the developers of each grant can be found on The Sia Forums.

Development

All public repositories can be found here.

renterd

renterd will be our new stand-alone renter. The renterd repository is currently public and can be found here.

Fixed an issue where too much money would be locked away in contracts upon renewal (View)
Lowered default gouging setting for the MaxContractPrice to 1SC (View)
Raised max path length for an object from 255 to 766 on MySQL (View)
Significantly speed up initial contract formation by forming contracts with unconfirmed parent transactions (View)
Track contracts on-chain after adding them to the bus to be aware of contracts that never get confirmed on-chain (View)
Validate S3 API key length in bus rather than upon using it (View)
Have the autopilot delete unconfirmed/pending contracts automatically after some time (View)
Fixed If-Match handling for range requests in the native API (View)
Fixed an issue where the bucket policy was not reversible once set to “public” (View)
Add force parameter to object rename endpoint to allow for overwriting objects (View)
Scanner config (View)
Clients & APIs (View)
Upgrade jape (View)
Deprecate CLI Flags (View)
Documentation updates (View)
Fix initial host scanning (View)

Trigger autopilot when appropriate (View)
Block until funded (View)
Improve alerts (View)
Fix overdrive (View)
Improve handling for the migration of critically low-health slabs (View)
Improve wallet redistribute (View)
Log fixes (View)
Sort files by health or name (View)
Migration Estimates (View)
S3 auth settings (View)
Multipart upload indices (View)
Fix slow query (View)
Timestamp index (View)
Fix low payout (View)

renterd ui

This is a small collection of monthly changes. A full detailed changelog can be found here.

Hosts last scan column now properly displays unscanned values rather than a very large time ago value. (View)
The wallet balance tooltip now shows spendable confirmed and unconfirmed values. (View)
Added support for the minRecentScanFailures autopilot hosts setting. (View)
Extremely small siacoin values will now show as hastings by default rather than 0SC. (View)
Files are now paginated. (View)
Onboarding fund wallet step now requires >0 SC instead of a full allowance. (View)
Wallet balance evolution graph is now hidden until at least 1 data point is available. (View)
The hosts table now has a last announcement column instead of the known since column. (View)
The bucket context menu now allows you to edit the bucket policy and toggle the read access between public and private. (View)

The simple configuration mode now shows download and upload estimates and pricing. (View)
Currency display can now be configured to siacoin, fiat, or both, along with a preference for when only one can be displayed. (View)
Fixed an issue with file search where selecting a file would navigate to the path without the bucket. (View)
The configuration now includes a setting for a migration surcharge multiplier, which allows you to set a factor for increasing the max download price when trying to repair critically low health sectors. (View)
The contract count shown in onboarding will update more quickly as it now includes pending contracts. (View)
The contracts table now includes a column for contract state that shows pending, active, complete, or failed. (View)
The contract list now updates after a contract is deleted. (View)

hostd

hostd is the app you’ll be using to rent out your excess storage space to the Sia network. The hostd repository is public, with a beta out now.

It’s now possible to write to volumes while they’re initializing. (View)

hostd ui

This is a small collection of monthly changes. A full detailed changelog can be found here.

Wallet now instructs new users to fund their wallet when there are no transactions yet. (View)
The wallet balance tooltip now shows spendable confirmed and unconfirmed values. (View)
The configuration now shows suggestions for pricing, collateral, and other settings. (View)
Extremely small siacoin values will now show as hastings by default rather than 0SC. (View)
Wallet balance evolution graph is now hidden until at least 1 data point is available. (View)
The revenue graph is now a bar stack, much more clearly showing earned vs potential revenue. (View)
The metrics graphs now show a y-axis. (View)
Currency display can now be configured to siacoin, fiat, or both, along with a preference for when only one can be displayed. (View)
App preferences no longer list unused GPU setting. (View)

walletd ui

This is a small collection of monthly changes. A full detailed changelog can be found here.

Currency display can now be configured to siacoin, fiat, or both, along with a preference for when only one can be displayed. (View)
App preferences no longer list unused GPU setting. (View)

core

The core repository is public and can be found here.

Added test cases in v1 (View)

app-sia-x

The app-sia-x repository is our Sia wallet app for the Ledger Nano S/X. The fill repository can be found here.

Implemented the changes needed to finish the Ledger review for the Stax app (View)

jape

The jape repository is public and can be found here.

Update the analyzer we use to check API client/server consistency to support having the client and server in separate packages and multiple files within those packages. (View, View)

Other

Anagami testnet launch

Looking ahead

hostd

More stability testing.
Finalizing the stable release at the end of the month.

renterd

Next up is adding a configurable memory cap for uploads and speeding up object listing endpoints to make the UI more snappy.
v1.0 testing and code freeze.
RHP4 and data recovery.