The State of Sia, August 2023

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

Summer is starting to draw down for the Sia Foundation team, and while there’s been a vacation here and there (which is why you won’t see anything notable for renterd this month, just work for renterd’s UI), the team has been heads-down doing our best work as we move through the releases of our new software. renterd and hostd are now available in beta, and walletd is ready in alpha.

We’ve been taking early feedback and making lots of improvements on these apps, while also making progress on larger features. The changes are consistent and noticeable, and we’ll keep this pace up as we move toward v1.0.

You can hear core dev Nate talking about these improvements, as well as utreexo and how we’re approaching awareness for the Foundation in our latest Community Town Hall.

We’ve also had the absolute pleasure of bringing on our latest team member, Developer Relations expert Oliver! I was terribly excited by him when I first found his resume, and he lived up to the hype all through the interview process. He’s been getting acquainted with the team and the role, balancing what we expect from him while at the same time finding his path and defining what Developer Relations at the Sia Foundation will be.

This stuff can be complicated — sometimes taking months to feel confident talking about the tech when you’re new to the ecosystem. All I’ll say so far is that we’re really impressed with his start. The rest, I’ll leave to him with a copy/paste of his intro message in our Discord server:

Heya all! Thank you so much for the warm welcomes. I’m thrilled to be on board with Sia!

Although I’m new to the Foundation and community, I’ve been an active listener in the web3 space, I have my passion for cloud computing, and discovering more about decentralised cloud storage fills me with alacrity, making me truly excited to work and collaborate with all of you.

I’ve joined as Developer Relations and have previous experience in this role within the realm of decentralisation, blockchain technology, and cryptography. As a ex-software developer, I bring a multi-perspective stance and empathetic approach, which enables me to grasp the importance of this role, including upholding the three pillars of Coding, Content, and Community.

My goals are to inspire developers, engage with the community, educate, support, drive awareness, and ultimately enhance the developer experience…but the list doesn’t stop there.

It’s been a great first week meeting with Nate, Frances, and Steve, and looking forward to meeting the rest of the team.

Development

All public repos can be found here.

renterd ui

The repos containing the various UIs being worked on can be found here. This is a small collection of monthly changes. A full detailed changelog can be found here.

• Currency options now include AUD. (Link)
• Contract timeline now always shows contract duration dates, on user interaction the specific labels will activate. (Link)
• Max storage and upload price settings now have an “including redundancy” option. (Link)
• The Settings dialog is now called App preferences. (Link)
• The default contract set description was updated to be more accurate — it does not apply to default migrations. (Link)
• The app now includes an auto-lock feature that can be enabled or disabled from the App Preferences menu. The locking inactivity period can also be configured. (Link)
• Contract timeline dates are now localized. (Link)
• Paginators now properly show loading state when fetching a new page or previous results when revalidating a cached page. (Link)
• Inactive sortable table columns now show a subtle caret to signify that they are sortable. (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 out now.

hostd This month focused mostly on bug fixes, usability, and stability improvements, which pushed back the release of some features.

• Released hostd v0.1.1 and v0.1.2 (Link, Link)
• Added support for YAML configuration files (Link)
• Added locked and risked collateral metrics, enabling hosts to track their collateral usage over time. (Link)
• Fixed /system/dir failing for the root path on Windows (Link)
• Fixed an issue causing the wallet to continuously reset after the wallet seed is changed (Link)
• Fixed an issue when resyncing the blockchain that would cause contracts to submit storage proofs long after they have expired
• Fixed edge-cases causing locked sectors to not be released

hostd ui

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

• Currency options now include AUD. (Link)
• Accepting contracts option can be disabled. (Link)
• Metrics now include locked and risked collateral. (Link)
• Contract data integrity checks can now be triggered from the contract action menu. Status updates are published to the alerts feeds. (Link)
• Bandwidth and operation metric graph colors have been revised for clarity. (Link)
• Contract timeline now always shows contract duration dates, on user interaction the specific labels will activate. (Link)
• Contracts columns now have a time category. (Link)
• Fixed a metrics issue where the data time range would stay fixed between page loads until explicitly changed. (Link)
• The Settings dialog is now called App preferences. (Link)
• Contract columns now include start date, expiration date, and payout date — start and expiration are sortable. (Link)
• Dates are now properly localized based on the user’s system. (Link)
• Fixed an issue where some metrics graphs and totals were including an incorrect large first datum. (Link)
• Storage stat cards no longer include total as an option. (Link)
• Collateral metric is now based on multiplier and properly shows in stats and on graph. (Link)
• The app now includes an auto-lock feature that can be enabled or disabled from the App Preferences menu. The locking inactivity period can also be configured. (Link)
• Contract timeline dates are now localized. (Link)
• Paginators now properly show loading state when fetching a new page or previous results when revalidating a cached page. (Link)
• Inactive sortable table columns now show a subtle caret to signify that they are sortable. (Link)

core

The core repo is public and can be found here.

Optimized blockchain sync in core. Historically, siad has always flushed data to disk after each new block, which causes a massive amount of disk I/O when syncing the chain. core now buffers data in memory and only flushes intermittently, resulting in a massive speedup. (Link)

walletd

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

• Finalized batching in the core chain.DBStore which should produce a substantial speedup in applications like walletd based on the benchmarks I conducted. (Link)

• I am now profiling walletd to see if there are any other avenues to increase performance.

walletd ui

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

• Currency options now include AUD. (Link)
• The wallet list now has a colum that shows the lock status. If the wallet is unlocked, the tooltip also shows the remaining time. (Link)
• The wallet list now has a siacoin balance column. (Link)
• Wallet dropdown now includes unlock, edit, and delete operations. (Link)
• Wallet auto-locking can be enabled or disabled from the App Preferences menu — the feature is enabled by default. The locking inactivity period can also be configured. (Link)
• Seed-based wallets can now be unlocked for a period of time. Each wallet will lock after a period of inactivity or if the app is closed. (Link)
• The Settings dialog is now called App preferences. (Link)
• Operations that require a seed, such as sending siacoin or generated addresses now use cached seed values when a wallet is already unlocked. (Link)
• The app now includes an auto-lock feature that can be enabled or disabled from the App Preferences menu. The locking inactivity period can also be configured. (Link)

Looking ahead

In August, barring any more bugs, we are going to be refocusing on finishing out our initial feature set for hostd's first "stable" release.

• Release hostd v0.2.0
• Release hostd desktop beta, a desktop version of the CLI app to ease onboarding for Windows and macOS users.
• Add financial metrics
• Automating data integrity checks and removing corrupt/missing sectors (Link)

We’ve also been plugging away on v2 consensus. All of the core types have been implemented, and consensus can now validate and apply v2 blocks. The big remaining items are: updating the consensus database, supporting v2 transactions in the txpool, and adding gateway RPCs for sending and receiving v2 types.

That’s all folks

From the Sia Foundation team to you, enjoy your August! With our team back in full force, you can expect a whole lot of renterd development updates next time. Thanks for your continued support and dedication as we put together the foundation of the decentralized cloud future.

Take care, and see you next month.

Discord, Email

Steve

@steveisonline on Discord

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