August was a month of steady progress across both development and the grants ecosystem. On the community side, the Growth Team attended DEF CON 33 in Nevada, where we connected with developers in the privacy and decentralization space to attract more builders to the Sia Network. On the engineering side, we added important fixes and refinements to multiple repositories. Plus, new releases to hostd and renterd further stabilized the Sia v2 experience.
In Grants Program news, multiple teams hit key milestones in preparation for upcoming betas. We also welcomed Rebecca to the Foundation as our new Grants Program Manager.
“Hi all — I wanted to introduce myself to the Sia community as your new Grants Program Manager. My name is Rebecca, and I’ve been in and out of the blockchain space since 2021. My background is in project & community management, and experiential marketing, and as a non-technical person my interest in blockchain has been focused on its practical application and potential to empower individuals and communities.”
Rebecca will play a key role in supporting grantees and shaping the program's evolution as it continues to expand.
Development Updates
renterd: Stability & Performance Fixes
Development this month focused on tightening reliability for contract management and user configuration.
- Avoid marking contracts as 'bad' if renewal or refresh fails for non-host-related reasons.
- Increased funding for contracts.
The latest release, renterd v2.6.0, improved wallet maintenance by increasing the value of redistributed UTXOs and adding a new option to the redistribution endpoint for setting a minimum UTXO value. It further improved robustness by periodically rebroadcasting transactions to ensure they are eventually taken up in a block. Finally, it enabled file downloads with external tools by exposing the raw object metadata.
hostd: Transition to RHP4 & Protocol Refinements
hostd development made significant strides as support for legacy protocols was retired.
- Added alert for expiring local certificates
- Added a 6 block buffer before storage is reclaimed to ensure small reorgs do not cause unnecessary contract failures.
- Fixed an issue where renewed contracts that are rejected will cause the original contract to fail.
- Updated
coreutilstov0.18.2andcoretov0.17.4 - Fixed rounding issues causing duplicate y-axis labels in the UI.
- Fixed pinned configuration settings that could not be set to $0.
On the release front, hostd v2.4.0 removed both RHP2/RHP3 and v1 support, introduced new endpoints for wallet events, improved contract retry logic, and added integrity checks for v2 contracts. A buffer for storage reclamation was also introduced to prevent reorg-related failures.
core & core-rs: Consensus & Transport
Work on the underlying consensus and Rust implementations progressed steadily.
- Fixed pruning issues caused by oversized RPC requests (core).
- Began initial experiments to fetch host settings via WebTransport (core-rs).
coreutils: Network Reliability Improvement
The toolkit for core Sia components underwent minor adjustments aimed at improving the network's reliability.
- Increased RHP4 RPC timeout to improve reliability for slow renters/hosts.
Grants Program Updates
Progress Reports from Ongoing Grants
- Lume Web – IPFS Portal: Delivered account dashboards, UI library work, various plugin updates, and deployed pinner.xyz. Next steps include completing IPFS service verification and building a file manager and uploader.
- Where – A Crowd-Powered Location Insight and Safety Rating App: Replaced Google Maps with Leaflet, configured
renterdon Zen, and set up an S5 node. Next steps focus on completing S5 integration for media and metadata handling. - S5 v1: Rewrite in Rust: Added guides, CLI tools, and new crates while refactoring store types for better ergonomics. Also introduced encrypted p2p networking via Iroh. Upcoming work includes finishing the RHP4 proxy, implementing missing specs, and adding end-to-end encryption.
- Cypherock X1 – Sia Network Integration: Completed technical specifications, secured Siascan API access, and designed firmware cryptographic architecture. Next steps include building firmware, protocol buffers, and a custom v2 transaction parser.
- SecureSphere Decentralized Vault: Delivered client-side file encryption, secure sharing, and a new desktop app with a password manager and backups. A beta release is scheduled for the third week of September.
- S5 Gateway & TypeScript Client: Implemented S5 protocol endpoints, improved docs, added Docker setup, and integrated enhanced S5.js into external projects. Next up is WASM foundations and media features.
- Luogo: Secure & Simple Group Location Sharing: Improved usability with QR pairing, dark mode, and bug fixes. Now listed on the App Store, pending release on the Play Store. With core grant work completed, ongoing updates will be lighter.
Final Thoughts
This month’s updates highlight the growing momentum of Sia’s ecosystem projects. With hostd and renterd continuing to stabilize under v2, and grantees pushing toward major milestones such as SecureSphere’s beta and S5’s Rust rewrite, the groundwork is being laid for broader adoption and stronger developer engagement. September promises to be an especially exciting month as new betas and integrations come online.
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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