Sia Community Update — December 2018
Happy New Year from the Sia team! The holiday season hit full throttle in December, and we hope you had as great a month as we did. We made good use of our time to recharge, reconnect, and — most importantly — eat. But that didn’t stop us from getting to work and releasing great new features, software, and plans for the Sia Storage Platform.
In this update
Sia Technical Roadmap
Developer’s Corner
Sia on Ledger Nano S
The new Sia API docs
Goobox Alpha
The Exchange Situation
The Sia Technical Roadmap
Sia lead dev and co-founder David Vorick announced the roadmap of features for the upcoming 1.4.0 release (codenamed Draco) and beyond, including:
1.4.0 — the ability of renters to fully recover their data from backups they hold of the Sia metadata
1.4.1 — partial downloads
1.4.2 — on-chain backups and data recovery from the seed
And future versions following 1.4.2 including file sharing, continuous backups, and lite clients for phones.
Read more in David’s Reddit post here.
Updates from the…
Over the past month, 22 issues were closed, 58 were created, and 42 pieces of code were added to the core codebase. We have a snapshot of updates here, but tbenz’ and hakkane’s official updates can be found weekly in the #announcements channel in Discord.
Notable features
Chris added the ability to scan for recoverable file contracts.
Matt created the BubbleHealth method, a system that quantifies and displays the health of whole directories uploaded to Sia.
Luke encrypted the renter-host protocol, and after the initial “handshake” that shares the authentication keys between both, all their messages will be secured.
David improved the accuracy of the client syncing progress indicator, and also expanded the / consensus API endpoint.
Chris finished the implementation of the snapshotting method of the new SiaFiles.
An early alpha of Sia v1.4.0 was released, and we expect a public release in the coming weeks.
A full list of updates can be found on GitLab. Just click on the version number to get the release notes for each update.
Becoming a contributor
If you’re interested in contributing to the Sia codebase, there are a number of issues waiting for community development. Please read the Guide to Contributing To Sia and comment on any issues you plan to work on.
Sia on Ledger Nano S
The official Sia app was released for Ledger Nano S in early December! This is a huge step forward and the absolute safest way to store your Siacoin.
Since this is a Developer release, it requires Developer Mode to be enabled in the Ledger Live settings, and is currently only recommended for power users due to a somewhat complicated process. Read through the whole post from Luke, who personally built the app, here.
And check our in-depth guide to getting started with Sia on Ledger here.
In the future, Ledger functionality will be built-in to Sia-UI. Once that’s done, you can expect an even easier process for building and signing secure Siacoin transactions (like, a lot easier).
The new Sia API docs
My job typically focuses on what is behind the scenes, but I was incredibly proud to be able to create our new API documentation found at sia.tech/docs.
This site now houses our API docs in an interactive and dynamic way, and is the best way to get started with building on top of Sia or contributing to the core code.
Head on over and check them out. They’re now officially part of our Sia GitLab project, and can be updated whenever new endpoints are added.
Goobox Alpha
Goobox, a stylish front-end for utilizing decentralized cloud storage, is currently alpha testing a new version of their software that’s currently on track for a mid-January release. You can follow along with their development for Sia in their GitHub project.
The Exchange Situation
The List
Here’s the current list of exchanges that support Siacoin. I keep this up to date, but if you know of any additions or removals please let me know.
It’s time to…
Thank you to the entire Sia community for a wonderful year. It’s been an absolute pleasure to be able to communicate our updates to you, answer your support requests, and work to make Sia easier to use.
I’m always available via email or Discord, and I can’t wait to share what we’ve got for 2019.
Steve
steve@sia.tech
steve#4381 on Discord
