The State of Sia, March 2024

Welcome to March! Our winter of coding has turned into a spring of… also coding. We spent most of the month working on bug fixes and usability for renterd and hostd, and also made significant progress on our Ledger Stax implementation and submitted it for review.

walletd has felt a bit lonely as it still sits in alpha, so we focused on testing the SQLite store, improving performance and finishing exchange mode. This month, we’ll continue working on stability and performance to prepare for the beta release.

We’re also moving into event mode, with two upcoming conferences that we’ll talk about later on. Expect to see the Foundation’s presence extend a bit more this year as we make our mark on industry events with booths, talks, and of course, swag.

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 app is available on the Sia website.

• Scan hosts twice before considering them unreachable to account for network issues (View)
• Add pagination to alerts endpoint (View)
• Add option to filter object stats by bucket (View)
• Integrating into renterd the new utils we have in coreutils. Made some small code contributions to the coreutils repo, mostly things that came from integrating the SingleAddressWallet. Still working on that. (View)
• Fix a crash caused by a panic related to the interaction recorder (View)
• Significantly improve performance of object stats endpoint (View)
• Add flag to only fetch object metadata from bus objects route (View)
• Add generateKey flag to multipart creation endpoint on bus (View)
• Speed up the deletion of a large number of objects (View)
• Don’t register an alert for downloads that failed due to the client interrupting it (View)
• Combine churn alerts into a single one to avoid spam (View)
• Added synthetic upload benchmarks to worker to test raw encryption/encoding speeds (View)
• Stop logging “mark sector as lost” when a sector didn’t actually belong to a filecontract (View)

• Speed up database code related to displaying the aggregated contract spending in the UI (View)
• Don’t register an alert for uploads that failed due to the client interrupting it (View)
• Reduce database lock contention on SQLite related to refreshing object health (View)
• Implement Peer Store (View)
• Extend contract set changed alert (View)
• Fixed a bug in metric migrations (View)

• Fixed a bug in uploading packed slabs (View)
• Improved account locking (View)
• Run unit tests on MySQL (instead of only running it on SQLite) (View)
• Extended worker mocks (View)

renterd ui

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

• File uploads now use multipart uploads. Closes SiaFoundation/renterd#975 (View)
• The browser now warns the user if they have active uploads and try to close the tab. (View)
• All graphs now remember any chart configuration that the user has selected. (View)
• Buckets now have a third view for viewing all active uploads, both local and from other sessions. (View)
• File uploads now have a max concurrency and get queued. (View)

• Alerts now support pagination. Closes SiaFoundation/renterd#1001 and SiaFoundation/renterd#862 (View)
• Remote file uploads can now be aborted from the uploads explorer. Closes #429 (View)
• Storage and upload price settings no longer default to or have the option to include redundancy. The price with the configured redundancy is now always shown below. (View)
• The transfers bar now only lists downloads and shows two buttons with one navigating to the new uploads list. (View)
• Alerts now support the accumulated churn alert. Closes SiaFoundation/renterd#1005 (View)
• Alerts now have a dedicated tab with a larger area for display and navigation. (View)

hostd

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

• Fixed force remove when dealing with missing volumes and corrupt sectors (View)
• Added a new metric “lost sectors” to track when a sector was removed do to data corruption or filesystem failure (View)

• Added alerts for failed contracts (View)

hostd ui

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

• Removed the maximum registry size configuration option. (View)
• Integrity check alert sector data will now update when there is an ongoing integrity check. (View)
• All app data will now refresh more frequently. (View)

• The node profile details now include uptime. Closes SiaFoundation/hostd#92 (View)
• The bandwidth settings for egress and ingress now have clearer descriptions. (View)
• The contract timeline labels have been darkened to increase contrast and readability. (View)

walletd

walletd is our brand new wallet-only software. Find the public repository here.

• Switched the peer store to SQLite (View)
• Changed the currency encoding to support sorting
• Refactored the SQLite store to deduplicate logic between different backend databases
• Added experimental support for Postgresql (View)
• Fixed incorrect balance tracking for Siafunds
• Changed the event list to align more with hostd and renterd
• Fixed an issue with duplicate transactions when rescanning the blockchain
• Added fixed structure to wallet and addresses
• Refactored the API to return lists instead of maps
• Added pagination to all list endpoints

walletd ui

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

• All app data will now refresh more frequently. (View)

core

The core repository is public and can be found here.

We worked on optimizing the performance of the core consensus database. Because of the extra utreexo data, the new database will be larger and take longer to sync, but we’ve done what we can to reduce the impact.

We also overhauled the consensus subscription API, giving subscribers more control and eliminating sources of deadlock.

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.

• Extend `SingleAddressWallet (View)
• Filter immature outputs in fund txn (View)
• Add transaction fee to miner payout (View)

• Fixed a crash in coreutils (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.

• Ledger Stax app is now submitted for review. Required miscellaneous updates like adding documentation (View), improving the tests, and a few others here (View)

Looking ahead

Next month we’ll continue working on the implementation of RHPv4, porting renterd and hostd to core, and shipping a beta release of walletd.

We’re also attending some events! We’ll have a booth set up at Paris Blockchain Week, with an in-person and virtual workshop about Sia.

Finally, you can catch us at Consensus in May, with another booth and a sponsored session.

That’s all folks!

Thanks for your continued support and dedication as we build the foundation of the decentralized future.

Take care, and see you next month.

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The State of Sia, March 2024 was originally published in The Sia Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.