The State of Sia, April 2023

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

And so ends the first quarter of 2023. In a feat of being Technically Correct, we have indeed released the renterd beta that we’ve been chatting about for a while, right on time in the late hours of March 31st :)

Featuring new architecture that the dev team has been working incredibly hard on, and a beautiful re-imagined UI/UX from Alex, this is our first step towards the future of the Foundation. Our newly-built apps for renting, hosting, and wallet functions will continue to march towards full releases. The plan right now is to have a hostd beta, and a renterd full release, in the coming months.

We can’t wait for you to try them out.

Switching gears, a recent development affecting the Sia ecosystem was the announcement from Bittrex that they are shutting down US operations, with the last full day to withdraw your funds being April 29, 2023. We’ve put together a brief guide for navigating this, as well as what it means for the broader Sia network, here.

Finally, while we mention this later I want to call something out right now. We’ve updated sia.tech with a new roadmap for the Foundation’s work. This is a mid to high level look at core Sia development, both current and future. It focuses on the big projects we’re working on, what we’ve got planned next, and includes an activity feed from all of our public repos.

It will be updated at least once a quarter to reflect changes in our priorities or to recognize significant accomplishments. This roadmap is important for a few reasons — it’s something easy to point new users, potential partners, and exchanges to. The activity feed gives a quick look at development that might otherwise fly under the radar. And it just looks really cool. Check it out over at sia.tech/roadmap.

I was personally really impressed with how quickly we put this together. What started out as a tentative request in an informal meeting turned into something real, and significant, in less than two weeks. And that’s with a whole bunch of other important things going on.

That’ll do it for me, let’s get on 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.

• Profiled and benchmarked the upload and download performance in renterd. A new benchmarking tool was written for this purpose (Link)
• Autopilot can be configured with multiple workers used for maintenance (Link)

• Tracking more contract info (Link), (Link)
• Improved object search endpoints (Link)
• Calculated transaction outflow (Link)
• Added endpoint for listing all contract sets (Link)
• Host prices are taken into account when scoring them (Link)
• Added Autopilot endpoints to fetch host info including their score (Link)
• Added testnet support via build flag (Link)
• Improved general working condition of the worker and autopilot by improving logging and fixing some small bugs (Link), (Link), (Link), (Link), (Link)
• Favour fast hosts when downloading (Link)
• Fixed docker container not shutting down cleanly (Link)
• Fixed files becoming unhealthy when corresponding contract is renewed (Link)
• Added a retry when applying failed db transactions (Link)

renterd ui

The repos containing the various UIs being worked on can be found here.

• The configuration settings now include host block height leeway.
• renterd now has a syncing flow that shows blockchain sync progress and allows the user to manually connect more peers and manage settings.
• The Files breadcrumb nav now scrolls to show the working directory when necessary.
• Host explorer now includes a block status column and the hover tooltip explains how each list contributed to being blocked or not.

• Apps now have embed specific build flags, embedded apps do not show a server field at login.
• The host explorer now supports filtering hosts by block status and address.
• The global command menu now has empty states.
• Contract spending is now displayed as a negative value.
• The file health indicator now shows a breakdown of shards per slab on hover.
• Data loading and filtering states have been refined across all features.
• The file explorer now lists parent directory for traversing up a level.
• The host explorer now features quick filters and actions for each host row.
• Contracts, hosts, and files tables now include an error state.
• Files now show their current health based on how many data shards have active contracts.
• The contracts explorer now supports filtering by address and public key.
• renterd now supports searching for files, access the feature from the Files actions menu or through the global command menu.
• The files explorer now supports navigation, directory creation, file deletion, and more.
• File paths are now linkable and reflected in the app URL.
• The blocklist manager now suggests adding well-known spam addresses to blocklist and shows whether renterd has any active contracts with hosts matching these addresses.
• The hosts feature now shows autopilot score and score breakdown columns.
• The gouging config now includes min max collateral.
• The files feature now has a view configuration menu.
• The apps are now built into Go modules exposing static assets as an embed.FS.
• The hosts feature now shows whether autopilot considers the host usable based on the scoring criteria. If the host is unusable, the reasons are listed.
• Fixed an issue where siacoin config values were being sent as decimal strings.
• Host, contract, and file explorer action menus are now all accessed via an icon on the far left of each row.

• The hosts feature now allows filtering to hosts with active contracts.
• renterd now supports allowlist and blocklist management, accessible from the global command menu or the hosts page.
• All autopilot features are now disabled and hidden if renterd is running with autopilot disabled.
• The contract timeline now shows points for contract revisions and proofs.
• Fix a z-index Safari bug that would clip the action dropdown in the AppLayout.
• PaginatorUnknownTotal now displays correct last page values.
• The Table components column sizing has been improved.
• Lock and sync screens now remember and redirect back to the previous page.

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.

• Added sign and notarize to publish workflow so macOS users can run binaries (Link)
• Added an OpenAPI spec so users can generate API clients in any language (Link)
• Separated the host and wallet private keys to make it possible for hosts to migrate from siad (Link)

• Added a "rejected" status to contracts that do not make it on chain (Link), (Link)
• Fixed performance issues in volume manager when dealing with large volumes (Link), (Link), (Link)
• Added debug logging for slow queries, this will make it easier to track down performance bottlenecks (Link)
• Added filtering to the contracts endpoint (Link)

core

The core repo is public and can be found here.

• Added network parameterization. This allows us to specify different network parameters, such as the target block time, without having to recompile the entire program as in siad (Link)
• Added gateway protocol support. This is a first step towards replacing the siad gateway module; much of the remaining code is already written, but uncommitted. renterd, hostd, and walletd will make use of this code to communicate with other Sia nodes (Link)

• Added tests for the consensus code in v1 core. These basically check that bad transactions are rejected (inputs > outputs, double spends, invalid contracts, etc) (Link), (Link)
• Added the RHP3 renew RPC protocol objects (Link)

website

• The website now features the Sia Foundation’s new roadmap (Link)

• The website now features a feed of GitHub development activity (Link)
• Added docs.sia.tech to the site map and adjusted categorization.

Ledger

• Worked on porting the existing Ledger app to the new Ledger Stax (Link)

That’s all folks

This was a big update. I’m sure next time around we’ll have more to say about the renterd beta, and the progress we’ve made towards the rest of our app suite. April also takes us to MIT Bitcoin, so we’ll have a recap of all the action from Boston.

Until next time!

Discord, Email

Steve

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