Sia January-April 2017 Update
In our effort to make Sia development as transparent as possible, we’ve decided to start a new initiative: regular triannual updates to the Sia community.
Startups typically provide regular reporting to their investors, but the crypto space is special. Our users, whether they buy or sell storage, mine, or develop innovative applications, all use and hold Siacoin. Many also hold Siafunds. For these reasons, we consider it our responsibility to provide as much up to date information as possible.
This January-April update will provide you with a snapshot of everything Sia. We will publish the next update in August.
Development
In the last four months we have released Andromeda (1.1.0) and Blue Moon (1.2.0), with a couple smaller updates in between. Andromeda brought wallet defragmentation, which greatly increased wallet reliability for power users like exchanges. It also enabled massive speed improvements — up to 300Mbps upload speeds, which is crazy fast!
Blue Moon brought some large usability improvements, with updates to the UI, but its biggest improvement was instant wallet unlocking. Previously, it took 20 or so minutes to unlock the Sia wallet. Now, in Blue Moon, wallet unlock takes only seconds. This has been in the works for a long time, and was one of our biggest feature requests. Instant wallet unlock greatly increases Sia’s usability.
It’s important to realize that Sia is fully decentralized with its own proof-of-work blockchain. As a company, we could shut down tomorrow, yet everything would still continue to function. This separates us from others in the decentralized storage space. This also makes development more challenging — it’s why feature like instant wallet unlock and reduced blockchain sync time are on the roadmap.
Over time, we believe that only truly decentralized networks will win the battle against existing, centralized storage companies like Amazon.
In the next couple months we will further increase Sia’s usability and better position the software as a viable cloud storage solution for businesses. We will do this by introducing the ability to repair files without retaining a local copy. This will allow our users to use Sia as a true cloud storage solution, and allow us to properly compete with Amazon.
Collaboration
Last month we announced our integration with Nextcloud, the popular open-source alternative to Dropbox and Google Drive. Nextcloud users now have the ability to expand their storage capacity with private, decentralized cloud storage by integrating with Sia.
The integration, which exists as an app on the Nextcloud app store, allows Nextcloud users to add a Sia folder to their private cloud. Users can simply add files to the folder and they will automatically upload to the Sia network.
This makes Sia more usable than ever before. Previously, Sia users could only upload files through the Sia-UI (manually) or via the Sia API. Now, by adding the Nextcloud app, users can simply add a Sia folder to their Nextcloud configuration.
We built the Nextcloud integration, and we will be looking to build more integrations with popular services in the future.
Business/Community
On the business side, we have updated the website homepage and will be making more updates to the website in the next month. We have migrated our blog to Medium and have posted some great new blog posts. We did a popular Reddit AMA. We also created a public roadmap.
Our community has been growing. We passed 2100 members in our Slack. Our community members have built some great things: a crowdsourced Wiki, SiaPulse, and SiaHub. A really cool project, SiaDrive, is launching soon — this allows users to mount Sia as a drive on Windows computers (and soon Mac/Linux).
Another amazing contributor product (and startup), Minebox — a NAS device tightly integrated with Sia — launched its presale. The device serves as a personal cloud and backup solution, while also storing backups of your files on the Sia network. At the same time, it acts as a host on the network, which generates money in the form of Siacoin.
Speaking of Siacoin, we have a current market cap of over $20 million (according to Coincap).
Network
We’ve experienced great network growth over the last four months. We currently have 100 terabytes of file contracts on the network and a total capacity of almost 1 petabyte.
As you can see from the below chart, contract size has rapidly increased from about 37 terabytes on December 31 (block height 85000) to 100 terabytes today (block height 101771). That’s a 170% increase in the last four months. We expect to continue this trend.
Our number of hosts is also up substantially, from 75 on December 31 to 145 today, a 93% increase. We also expect to continue this trend.
What’s Next
Over the next year, we will continue to improve the software (through updates like file sharing, video streaming, and faster blockchain sync), grow the community, and start to bring in business customers.
Our goal in the next couple years is to make Sia a viable competitor to Amazon S3 and other major centralized cloud services.
In the long term, we want Sia to be the storage layer of the internet!
See our public roadmap for more details.
Notable Blog Posts
- Decentralization in Light of the Recent Amazon S3 Downtime
- Why blockchains are the future of cloud storage
- Addressing Thoughtful Concerns about Sia’s Security + Viability
- Using Sia as a Storage Back-End for Nextcloud
Please let us know if you have any questions! You can learn more or say hello on our website, wiki, forum, Slack, Github, or Twitter!
