[Blog] The State of Sia, January 2023

The State of Sia, January 2023

We’re back with the State of Sia, a monthly installment looking at development and team updates for The Sia Foundation.

Welcome to 2023! A new year always stirs excitement for the future and reflection at what was accomplished the year prior. For an individual, it might be time to make that resolution a reality. For an organization, it’s time to re-align on goals and get ready for another year of forward progress.

When I joined the Foundation, there were just a few months left in 2022. Even within my short time here, I’m incredibly proud to see how much we’ve grown. Here’s a highlight reel of a few notable things the Foundation did throughout last year:

released Embarcadero, a tool for conducting escrowless Siafund/Siacoin swaps completely redesigned sia.tech released Sia v1.5.8 and v1.5.9 launched the Grants Program, and approved four of the eight initial proposals brought on three new hires from Skynet Labs (hi!) and most importantly, made lots of progress on our new apps for Sia — renterd, hostd, and walletd

We made pretty big strides in terms of our development focus and organizational structure, and we intend to carry this into the new year. Before I get ahead of myself though, let’s take a walk through specific work done in the month of December.

Development

All public repos can be found here.

core

The core repo is currently public and can be found here.

We implemented a modernized version of Sia’s consensus code. This will make syncing much faster, enable blockchain pruning, and greatly ease the transition to Utreexo. This code has not been merged yet; first, we need to run the new version alongside the old version while processing the entire blockchain, to ensure there are no discrepancies between the two.

Relevant code is here.

renterd

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

We worked on getting uploads, downloads, automatic contract formations and renewals (all functions of the autopilot) working in production and beyond our integration tests to allow for more expansive testing.

Implemented upload + download HTTP endpoints in renterd, with support for range requests. Note from Luke: Range requests are a feature of HTTP APIs that allows you to download “ranges” of data within a file, rather than having to download the entire thing. It’s a pretty basic feature, but an important one.

Added price gouging checks, though not quite finished. Although that’s not 100% finished yet Next step is migrations (data repair)

hostd

hostd is the app you’ll be using to rent out your excess storage space to the Sia network.

Migrated API to SiaFoundation/jape, add missing endpoints from spec Replaced us in integration tests with renterd Added payout transactions to SingleAddressWallet Replaced remaining ephemeral stores with SQLite stores Replaced consensus module with chain manager

walletd

walletd will be the place to store your Siacoins.

We ultimately decided not to go with the bitcoin coin selection algorithm because, after writing some simulation code, we found it was not much better from a fee minimization perspective than the random algorithm.

skyrecover

skyrecover is a set of utilities to recover lost skyd data. The skyrecover repo is currently public and can be found here.

Created a tool to search hosts for lost sectors using the Skynet file metadata Created a tool to download lost sectors from hosts using the Skynet file metadata

Web/website

The Sia Network Hosting Best Practices document has been added to the website. The Sia Foundation has prepared this document to provide high level guidance for using the Sia network. Our goal in doing so is not to provide legal advice, but to establish a set of common best practices for Hosts. This will help ensure the continued efficient functioning of the Sia network and enable Hosts and Renters alike to continue to realize its benefits.

The Sia Foundation suggests that all Hosts know and follow these best practices. Please also check back to review these best practices, as we may update them from time to time.

We have updated the grants page to be a little more specific, and will soon add more useful information such as an FAQ section.

Web/renterd

We continued work on the renterd app and integrating the new bus and autopilot APIs across all features.

We built a React library for interacting with renterd's new bus and autopilot APIs. The library is a set of fully typed React hooks for fetching data and making mutations. The library will release along with the renterd app, and will be a convenient option for any developers looking to build UIs with the renterd APIs.

Team Updates

Our three newest hires have all settled into their new roles nicely. Chris and PJ found their footing immediately and set to work on various renterd tasks. I know the team really appreciates having more highly experienced Sia devs to share ideas and workload as we develop these powerful new apps.

I hope the Ops team is as happy about me joining the team as I am to be here! We’ve set to work on a few important things, like enacting new policies for the team and taking over project management for the Grants Program. My aim is always to help an organization marry efficiency and compassion, and I‘m proud to be part of a team here at the Foundation that strives for these goals.

Other Foundation Happenings Advent of Code

Advent of Code presented a month of fun challenges, and we’re thankful to all participants. As mentioned last month, any participant who completed seven or more days will receive a prize from the team. We’ll have an announcement regarding the prize this week or early next. If you qualify, keep an eye on the #announcements channel in our Discord server for more info.

Quarterly Report

The Q4 2022 Transparency Report has been published! These updates are an important part of the transparency that we promote, giving our community insight into our highlighted work, financials, and future plans.

And remember, you can always check out our previous updates over on our website.

Grants Program

We’re really pleased with how the Grants Program performed in 2022. The committee reviewed a total of eight proposals and approved four, and we’re excited to see how these projects develop over the coming year.

Remember to checblog.sia.tech to find out the latest grant happenings.

If you think you’ve got a great idea to benefit the Sia ecosystem, submit your proposal over at forum.sia.tech.

That’s all folks

From everyone here at the Foundation, thank you for a wonderful 12 months, and thank you for your continued support. The new year sees us refreshed, with a larger team, and on the brink of releasing some of the most significant software the Sia network has ever seen.

Until next time!

Discord, Email

Steve

steve#4381 on Discord