The State of Sia, June 2025

June 2025 was a landmark month for the Sia Foundation and the Sia network as a whole. June 6th marked the network’s 10-year anniversary, coinciding with the successful activation of the v2 hardfork and the unveiling of Sia’s comprehensive rebrand—a major milestone signaling a bold new era for decentralized storage. The Foundation’s rebrand reintroduces Sia as a principled, accessible, and professional platform for individuals, developers, and enterprises alike—with renewed positioning as the world's safest cloud storage, by design.

Throughout the month, the Foundation published several key articles, including From Fragile to Fail-proof: Why the World Needs Sia Cloud Storage, which explored how decentralized architecture addresses the systemic vulnerabilities of centralized data storage, and Sia v2: A New Brand for a New Era of Decentralized Storage, which outlined the motivations and symbolism behind the rebrand.

A major partnership was also announced with HackerNoon, one of the web’s largest independent tech media platforms. Through this collaboration, HackerNoon has backed up its entire publishing archive—over 100,000 stories—to the Sia network, with more than 2,000 new articles added each month. To coincide with the partnership, the Foundation launched a Developer Survey to gather input from builders interested in working with Sia’s stack.

Development Updates

renterd: Robust Contract Management & Consensus Refinements

Development on renterd this month focused on core stability and contract workflow improvements as the v2 hardfork took effect. Notable enhancements included:

• Removal of legacy RHP2 and RHP3 protocols, simplifying the codebase and reducing maintenance overhead.
• Improved contract refresh behavior with more generous collateral allocations, reducing the frequency of refresh operations.
• Refined syncing logic to avoid unnecessary consensus resets and limit repeated chain state resets.
• Ensured contract funding transactions use only confirmed outputs, improving reliability.
• Renamed blockchain.db to consensus.db and relocated it for consistency and clarity.

The renterd UI saw stability improvements for upload handling, especially under Firefox and HTTP/1.1 conditions, and fixes for upload directory behavior and active upload status displays.

hostd: Stability Improvements & Hardfork Enforcement

This month’s releases culminated in hostd v2.3.5, delivering critical fixes and enhancements:

• Blocked new v1 contracts post-hardfork to ensure network consistency.
• Addressed panics and errors related to contract reverts and rejected contracts.
• Introduced better shutdown handling, including suppression of redundant connection failure logs.
• Reintroduced retry logic for locked database transactions, reducing operational errors under load.

The hostd UI was refined to properly render contract timelines when rejected contracts are present, aligning its presentation with the updated backend contract lifecycle.

walletd ui: Improved Ledger Support & UX Refinements

This month’s updates to the walletd UI centered on improving the user experience and expanding hardware wallet support:

• Externally added wallets now appear correctly as watch-only accounts in the interface.
• Sortable columns on the wallets list now function as expected, improving data navigation and organization.
• The testnet warning banner was corrected for clearer messaging.
• Ledger wallets now support blind signing, a necessary interim feature until Ledger adds native support for v2 transactions.

explored: Host Map Restoration & UX Enhancements

The explored UI received key updates this month:

• Reintroduced the interactive host map, now accessible directly from the siascan nav menu.
• Restored the host revenue calculator.
• Harmonized contract status terminology (e.g., "in progress" contracts are now labeled "active").
• Enhanced transaction headers with clear type badges for quicker scanability.

core & coreutils: Protocol Cleanup & Performance Gains

Key refinements in the Foundation’s core libraries:

• Removed support for legacy v1 peers, cleaning up networking code.
• Improved locking behavior and resolved race conditions around chain tip memory management in coreutils.

These updates continue to harden the protocol layer for improved performance and reliability across the network.

Grant Program Updates

Newly Approved Grants

• SecureSphere Decentralized Vault: SecureSphere is an open-source decentralized vault built on the Sia network that combines password management, breach monitoring, and encrypted file storage and sharing. The new grant covers mobile, desktop, and browser extension delivery, supporting a comprehensive, production-ready cross-platform solution aimed at empowering users and institutions with secure, user-owned data management.

Progress Reports from Ongoing Grants

• S5 Gateway & TypeScript Client: This month saw completion of the enhanced s5.js architectural design, alignment with the Rust S5 v1 spec, and establishment of a CI/CD-enabled repository. The team is preparing to implement serialization/deserialization routines and foundational API methods next month.
• Nydia: Passkey Holder: Nydia added native Ed25519 support across all major browsers, developed a feature-parity Safari extension, and expanded WebAuthn compatibility. Next steps include rigorous testing of attestation mechanisms and refining asynchronous sync behavior.
• Luogo: Secure & Simple Group Location Sharing: The s5_messenger package reached initial release state and Luogo’s main app development is progressing with complete maps integration and significant performance optimizations on mobile. The team aims to complete a functional MVP in July.
• SiaGraph: This month included improvements to scoring algorithms, alerting, and API development. Progress was slightly delayed by blockchain data inconsistencies, but the issues have been resolved and work continues on API and frontend design for new stats.
• Lume Web: The Lume team completed a major redesign of its config manager and event bus subsystems, finalized unit and integration tests for core services, and began a full rework of its IPFS plugin. Looking ahead, Lume will prioritize launching its user dashboard webapp and integrations for IPFS, Nostr, and LBRY, with atproto planned for later in Q3.
• S5 Network: The grant concludes this month, with milestones including completion of RHP4 support for browser-based Sia access and finalization of most key specifications. The developer has begun a Rust rewrite for the entire S5 stack to improve performance, simplify cross-platform deployment, and enable long-term maintainability, with a stable v1 release expected within two months.

Final Thoughts

June 2025 will be remembered as the most transformative month in Sia's history. From celebrating a decade of decentralized storage, to unveiling a refined brand identity, to forging major partnerships that extend Sia’s reach and influence—the Foundation has set the tone for the next chapter of its mission. Alongside these strategic advances, the network itself continues to evolve rapidly, with critical software updates, UI refinements, and an increasingly diverse grant ecosystem helping Sia scale and mature into the world’s safest cloud storage by design.

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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