The State of Sia, January 2024

Published in

The Sia Blog

6 min readJan 24, 2024

Coming into the new year, Sia hit a major milestone with the unveiling of the first stable releases of hostd and renterd on Christmas Day 2023. These new releases represent not just the culmination of rigorous development and dedication, but a significant leap forward in our mission to revolutionize decentralized storage. It marks a pivotal moment where the Sia renting experience has been fundamentally reshaped, offering enhanced scalability, robustness, and user accessibility. The launch of renterd and hostd is a testament to our team's pursuit of excellence and a commitment to delivering a platform that is not only powerful in its technical capabilities but also intuitive and user-friendly. This milestone reflects a better understanding of the needs of both individual users and enterprises, paving the way for more innovative, secure, and efficient data storage solutions in the decentralized space.

The Sia Grant Committee’s approval of six new grants last month showcases our dedication to fostering innovation within the Sia ecosystem. These grants span a diverse range of projects and represent a step towards enhancing the utility and reach of the Sia network.

Track Your Investments: WebApp where one can track their daily/weekly/monthly P&Ls of Investments such as Stocks, Crypto, Mutual Funds, ETFs, Metal, etc!
HLTC Upgrade for Atomic Swaps: Enhancing Sia’s capabilities to support Atomic Swaps.
Mintyplex: a secure digital commerce platform using IPFS renterd storage 4 and on-chain certificates of authenticity.
HostScore: A tool for benchmarking Sia hosts.
Lume Web 2024: An initiative aimed at further developing the web aspect of Sia.

The Sia Innovate & Integrate Hackathon kicked off on December 15th. The hackathon offered two tracks: one for developers to build applications using renterd's S3-compatible gateway and another for content creators to produce educational material simplifying renterd's complexities. The diverse range of projects and content showcased the potential of decentralized storage and the versatility of the Sia platform

Development

All public repositories can be found here.

renterd

renterd is our new stand-alone renter. The renterd repository is currently public and can be found here, and the v1.0.2 release is available for download on the Sia website.

Parallelized uploading of packed slabs in the background (View)
Cache object health alongside object in database to speed up retrieving objects (View)
Added a memory manager for downloads to improve performance (View)

Made sure that all timestamps returned by the API are RFC3339 formatted UTC timestamps (View)
Reduce locking in database to increase db performance on MySQL (View)
Fix issues for Windows 11 users where binding to “localhost” wouldn’t work (View)
Return aggregate contract metrics when no specific contract is specified (View)
Added an endpoint to prune metrics (View)
Fixed issue where renewals would fail due to excessive collateral (View)
Have /objects/stats endpoint return information about incomplete multipart objects (View)
Allow for filtering contracts by set as well as attach set information to contracts returned through the API (View)
Wallet metrics. (View)
Contract pruning metrics. (View)
Metrics required param. (View)
Record interactions. (View)
Contract size query optimizations. (View)
Remove blockUntilFunded. (View)
Send alert when uploads/downloads fail. (View)
Schedule trigger when funded. (View)
Price table cache fix. (View)
Pruning gouging checks. (View)
Upload overdrive. (View)
Increase withdrawal expiry. (View)
Remove context. (View)
Fix contexts in autopilot. (View)

renterd ui

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

The file stats overall health now uses the min health reported by the object stats endpoint. (View)
Wallet transactions are now paginated. (View)
Files can now be sorted by name and health, ascending or descending. (View)
File uploads are now disabled if the blockchain is not fully synced. (View)
File warnings are now a simple warning icon next to the stats and are explained in a popover. (View)
Selecting a file search result now navigates to the directory and applies a file name filter. (View)
The bucket empty state now has a button for navigating back to the bucket list. (View)
Files in the current directory can now be filtered. (View)
Copyable entity values now have a context menu with support for opening Siascan pages. (View)
The advanced configuration now includes a prune sector roots setting. (View)
Contracts now have a details view that shows a graph of the contract’s daily funding and spending. (View)
The alerts dialog now has an “all” filter. (View)
The wallet balance shown on the wallet page is now spendable plus unconfirmed. (View)
The contract funding and spending graph now shows a data point for brand new contracts. (View)
The default suggested pricing for new users is now based on Sia Central averages. (View)
The reported average redundancy factor now takes into account multipart uploads. (View)

hostd

hostd is the app you use to rent out your excess storage space to the Sia network. The hostd repository is public, the v1.0.1 release is available to download on the Sia website.

Added read and write alerts to volumes (View)
Added validation to the net address when changing settings (View)
Added additional configuration for logging (View)
Changed hostd to automatically open the web UI on startup (View)
Fixed database lock contention on Windows (View)
Added webhooks for alerts (View)
Add fallback when localhost fails on Windows instead of crashing (View)
Added additional endpoints for verifying the health of stored data (View)
Released the siad host migration utility

hostd ui

The alerts dialog now has an “all” filter. (View)
Copyable entity values now have a context menu with support for opening Siascan pages. (View)
The wallet balance shown on the wallet page is now spendable plus unconfirmed. (View)
Metrics intervals for 1Y and ALL are now weekly and monthly. (View)

walletd ui

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

The send siacoin and siafund features now support specifying custom change and claim addresses. (View)
Ledger wallets now support sending siafunds. (View)
Seed wallets now support sending siafunds. (View)
Event balances are now calculated with only relevant transaction components. (View)
The ledger generate addresses dialog now shows a close action if no new addresses have been generated. (View)
Copyable entity values now have a context menu with support for opening Siascan pages. (View)

core

The core repository is public and can be found here.

The transaction pool can now automatically “fix” Merkle proofs (View)
Multiproofs are now encoded more efficiently (View)

coreutils

coreutils is a newly created repository meant to hold implementations of Sia components that will be reused across our various nodes. The full repository is public and can be found here.

Anagami Testnet

“Anagami” is our alpha testnet for Sia’s upcoming Utreexo hardfork, expected later this year. Its used to test the hardfork activation and new consensus code in a production-like environment before deploying to mainnet.

We’ve made big strides towards the hardfork last month. After some early bugs, Anagami has been stable for a few weeks now. We plan to reset it again sometime in late February or early March to test activation again.