The State of Sia, June 2023

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

The Sia Foundation takes a measured approach—one that has served us well in keeping the company strong and the network moving forward through a global pandemic and recession concerns. Bringing on three members from Skynet Labs during their shutdown was also a big deal for us. It resulted in a large increase in the team size, bringing with it effort to maintain the positive, people and platform-first culture we’re building.

It’s been a bit of time since then though, and we’re all in our new groove. It’s time to improve the Foundation’s and Sia’s capabilities yet again with the addition of our first 2023 employee, a Developer Relations expert.

We’re in process with this and moving full-steam ahead, but if you’re think you’re the perfect fit for the role there’s still time to get your application in.

Beyond that, we’re moving ahead with some fantastic progress across the dev spectrum, and we should have something tangible for the hostd beta by the time the next one of these articles comes out.

Our quarterly report is coming up at the end of the month as well, so be on the lookout for some seasonal insight to Foundation operations. Let’s get to the good stuff.

Development

All public repos can be found here.

renterd

renterd will be our new stand-alone renter. The renterd repo is currently public and can be found here, and the app is available in beta.

• Fixed a bug where contracts wouldn’t expire for unusable hosts (Link)
• Fixed a bug that prevented workers from broadcasting renewal txns (Link)
• Fixed a bug where account balances weren’t synced due to the account being empty (Link)
• Fixed a bug where a contract wouldn’t renew if there is no valid pricetable (Link)
• Fixed a bug where long running uploads would fail due to host height gouging (Link)
• Revision number of contracts stored within the bus are now updated alongside contract spending metrics (Link)

• worker endpoint /rhp/contracts/active was renamed to /rhp/contracts and returns all contracts now (Link)
• host_sectors table was dropped from the database (Link)
• migrations are now performed on all workers of a cluster in parallel (Link)
• hosts that announce themselves on private IP ranges will no longer be scanned by default (Link)
• bootstrapping renterd from an existing consensus.db won’t block the startup anymore and the API is available immediately (Link)
• wallet persistence was migrated to SQL DB (Link)
• Added the ability to set contract set and redundancy params in the worker API client (Link)
• Fixed bug in private IP check (Link)

• Added issue templates to repo (Link)
• Exposed database config through CLI (Link)
• Benchmarking and improving the performance of uploads — looking at a 4x improvement over the baseline so uploads are easily four times faster now and should scale pretty well after we rollout this fix. The progress can be followed here (Link)

renterd ui

The repos containing the various UIs being worked on can be found here. A full detailed changelog can be found here.

• The copy authenticated URL toast is now properly formatted (Link)
• Contract timelines and other features based on block height now use estimated block height for current height until synced (Link)
• The delete file confirmation now uses a red button (Link)
• Core features are now immediately accessible without waiting for blockchain sync to complete (Link)
• Hovering over the Sia logo now triggers a popover that shows daemon info and sync status (Link)
• Deleting a file now requires confirmation (Link)
• Configuration tabs now include more specific validation errors and feedback (Link)
• Configuration now shows average network prices based off Sia Central data (Link)
• The contracts feature has been updated to use the new endpoint (Link)

hostd

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

• Created setup guides for Linux, macOS, and Windows (Link)

• Added status to volume (ready, resizing, removing) to enable tracking the current state of the volume.
• Fixed an issue with force removing a volume failing when the volume file is missing.
• Fixed an issue with the a contract’s reject lifecycle action triggering every block
• Fixed issues with settings endpoint when patching DDNS options
• Fixed an error with /system/dir?path=~ when the user does not have a home directory.
• Fixed an issue where RHP3 account refunds would trigger max account balance error. Fixes an issue when using contract payments.
• Hid 0 H intermediary transactions from the wallet. Intermediary transactions do not affect the wallet and add bloat to the transaction list.
• Added “Subtract Fee” param to /wallet/send endpoint. This allows the user to subtract the transaction fee from the send amount, useful when sending the entire wallet balance.
• Added handling for confusing AWS Route53 error messages
• Added special handling in /system/dir for Windows paths. / or \ will now return used drive letters.
• Added error field to contract integrity check. Errors were only available in the log, but now can be seen in the API response.
• Finished API documentation (Link)

hostd ui

A full detailed changelog can be found here.

• Directory navigation in the volume creation dialog now works properly when navigating up to the root drive (Link)
• Metrics charts now properly show the final data point (Link)
• New directories can now be created directly from the volume creation dialog directory selection tool (Link)
• Dynamic DNS configuration errors are now displayed in full (Link)
• Price settings are no longer described as “minimum” (Link)
• Host announcement transactions now show up labeled as such in the transaction list (Link)
• Volumes view and create now available from the command palette (Link)
• Contract total usage sum now no longer includes risked collateral (Link)
• Contract timelines and other features based on block height now use estimated block height for current height until synced (Link)
• Core features are now immediately accessible without waiting for blockchain sync to complete (Link)
• Hovering over the Sia logo now triggers a popover that shows daemon info and sync status (Link)
• The displayed wallet balance is now spendable+unconfirmed (Link)
• The volume delete dialog now resets when it is closed (Link)
• Risked collateral is now next to locked collateral in the contracts table (Link)

jape

jape is what we use to check that the API routes between client/server are consistent.

• Added support for HTTP PATCH requests (Link)

ledger

• Porting to Stax (Link)
• Fixes after Ledger’s review (Link)

That’s all folks

We’re enjoying the beginning of summer and taking steps towards building a stronger Foundation and a better Sia.

Until next time!

Discord, Email

Steve

steve#4381 on Discord

The State of Sia, June 2023 was originally published in The Sia Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.