State of Sia, June 2024

Welcome to the June edition of the State of Sia. This month has been a period of significant advancements and strategic growth for the Sia Foundation.

Our primary development focus remains on the upcoming hardfork, which will bring numerous accessibility, quality-of-life, and performance improvements for both storage consumers and providers. Significant progress has been made in enhancing hostd, walletd, and core components, including vital bug fixes, new features, and optimizations. Notably, renterd has undergone substantial code refactoring and stability improvements, ensuring a more robust and efficient system.

UI enhancements across various components have improved user experience, with new features such as auto-calculation options for allowances and max collateral values, and support for IPv6 addresses. We also introduced bus events to enhance event handling and performance in renterd. These updates are setting the stage for a more streamlined and user-friendly Sia network.

On the growth front, we’ve been successfully uploading public datasets and are now working on building a portal for public access. We are also forming partnerships with other non-profits to offer their datasets on Sia via IPFS and S3 gateways. Our recent participation in Consensus 2024 has generated integration and partnership interest, with more detailed announcements to follow as these collaborations solidify. Our next event will be Mainnet 2024 in New York at the end of September, and we look forward to connecting with more members of the community there.

Looking ahead, post-hardfork development will focus on reducing on-boarding friction for developers, consumers, and enterprises. Key initiatives include lighter worker agents for remote operations without API proxying, better horizontal scalability, direct network interactions for users on all devices, and more accessible SDKs for builders. We are also developing products aimed at regular consumers to broaden Sia’s appeal beyond tech enthusiasts and developers.

Overall, this month has been a period of robust development and strategic outreach, setting the stage for exciting future developments in the Sia ecosystem. Stay tuned for more updates and detailed change logs.

Development Updates

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.

• Added some protection against panics in our RPC code crashing renterd (View)
• Fixed an error related to maxMerkleProofResponseSize being too small when pruning large contracts. (View)
• Simplified the algorithm to compute the amount of funds going into renewed contracts. (View)
• Debugged contract pruning fails and greatly reduced them by updating the constants related to batching (View)
• Added bus events that are triggered on certain events: updating settings, consensus updates, contract lifecycle updates, etc. (View)
• Building on those bus events, we built a worker cache, currently caching various metadata required for downloads and increasing overall download performance. (View)
• Continued efforts on migrating renterd over to the new wallet, subscriber, and syncer types. (View)

renterd ui

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

• Allowance now has a field-specific option to auto-calculate its value. (View)
• The configuration page now has a view menu in the action bar that is consistent with all other feature pages. (View)

• Basic configuration mode no longer sets certain fields in the background. (View)
• Fixed an issue where the first-time configuration would not show the optimal recommendations. (View)
• Fixed a bug where the churn alert would display NaN for the percentage when the total size was zero. (View)
• Fixed an issue where selecting a bucket context menu option would also navigate into the bucket. (View)
• Fixed an issue where toggling between basic and advanced modes would sometimes not re-validate all configuration fields. (View)
• Fixed an issue where the transaction information would not show in the dialog. (View)
• Fixed an issue that broke some dialogs, including the bucket policy and bucket delete dialogs. (View)
• The host blocklist dialog now supports adding IPv6 addresses. (View)
• The connect to peer dialog now supports IPv6 addresses. (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.

• Released hostd v1.1.1-beta. (View)
• Fixed an error when trimming more than 32000 sectors from a contract. (View)
• Fixed the value calculation for unconfirmed transactions in the wallet. (View)

hostd ui

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

• Max collateral now has a field-specific option to auto-calculate its value. (View)
• The configuration page now has a view menu in the action bar that is consistent with all other feature pages. (View)

• Basic configuration mode no longer sets certain fields in the background. (View)
• Refined the volume deletion toast message to “Volume is now being permanently deleted”. (View)
• Fixed an issue where the transaction information would not show in the dialog. (View)
• The connect to peer dialog now supports IPv6 addresses. (View)

walletd

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

• Added the config command. (View)
• Refactored events so signatures could be validated. (View)
• Added new endpoints for getting unconfirmed events. (View)

walletd ui

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

• The connect to peer dialog now supports IPv6 addresses. (View)
• Unconfirmed transactions rows now show their Siacoin amount and fees. (View)

core

The core repository is public and can be found here.

• Fixed a bug in the decoder that caused OOM crashes during initial sync. (View)
• Add fuzzer for SpendPolicy and SatisfiedPolicy decoding. (View)
• Fix crash in SatisfiedPolicy decoding due to lack of validation of key length (View)

explored

The explored repository is a private repository currently under development.

• Add metrics, notably total hosts, active/failed/successful contracts, storage utilization, circulating supply, and total contract revenue (View)
• Added multiple reorg tests. (View)
• Added host contracts history. (View)
• Added a test involving reverting file contracts and their revisions. (View)
• Fixed a bug where contract revisions were not being reverted properly. (View)

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