May 2025 marked a historic milestone for the Sia Foundation, setting the stage for the v2 hardfork activation on June 6th and unveiling a bold new brand identity that reflects Sia’s evolution into a global leader in decentralized cloud storage. The Foundation spent the month preparing the community for this transition, issuing final upgrade reminders and publishing technical documentation to assist users in migrating to the new software stack—renterd, hostd, and walletd. This upgrade is not optional: nodes that fail to upgrade will fall out of consensus, rendering wallets unusable and contracts void.
Download the latest software here.
To help users navigate this pivotal moment, the Foundation released a trio of blog posts tackling Sia’s past, present, and future. The first, Censored: No Free Speech Without Data Privacy and Ownership, explored the growing relationship between online censorship, surveillance, and the need for decentralized infrastructure. It reinforced the Foundation’s brand value that true personal agency cannot exist without control over one's data.
Next, From Genesis to Adoption provided a sweeping retrospective on the network’s first decade—recounting the founding vision, the launch of the genesis block in 2015, and Sia’s resilience through technical and political challenges. The post also highlighted major turning points like the 2018 ASIC fork, the formation of the Foundation in 2020, and the debut of renterd and hostd as the bedrock of a new decentralized cloud stack.
Finally, Sia v2 – A Fork in the Road laid out what users can expect from the v2 upgrade, including Utreexo’s revolutionary sync speeds, modular app design, and the browser-native RHP4 protocol. It made one point crystal clear: this isn’t just an upgrade—it’s a redefinition of what decentralized cloud storage can be.
These announcements coincided with the Foundation’s most significant brand transformation to date. After eight months of research and design, Sia has adopted a new visual identity, messaging strategy, and engagement model tailored for a broader audience. With clearer language, refined positioning, and new tooling like indexd and nomad, the decentralized experience is no longer reserved for technical users—it’s now intuitive, fast, and privacy-first by design.
As the network celebrates its tenth anniversary, the Foundation is also expanding its team to meet growing demand and global visibility. We’re currently hiring a Social Media Manager to help lead our public outreach and steward the voice of Sia across platforms. If you're passionate about privacy, decentralization, and creative storytelling—we want to hear from you.
With a hardfork on the horizon and a new decade of innovation ahead, Sia is not just ready for the future—it’s building it.
Development Updates
renterd: Resilient Slab Handling & Legacy Contract Stability
Work on renterd this month continued the march toward v2 readiness, with targeted improvements to contract handling, data integrity, and error resilience:
- Persisted locked and spent UTXOs across restarts for better transaction continuity.
- Hardened against writing incomplete partial slab data, reducing file corruption risk.
- Introduced logic to prevent renewal of v1 contracts using RHP4, ensuring clean migration to v2.
- Improved address filtering and error-checking during RHP4 downloads.
- Transitioned legacy contract operations (funding, pruning) to RHP3 for improved stability.
These changes prepare the network for a smoother renter upgrade experience while increasing reliability for apps depending on Sia’s new modular stack.
hostd: nomad Integration & Certificate Automation
The release of hostd v2.3.1 rounded out a month of major infrastructure improvements and browser support upgrades:
- Added support for
nomad, the Foundation’s new zero-config TLS certificate service, allowing seamless HTTPS access to hosts at.sia.host. - Automated connection checks via SiaScan ensure hosts stay network-accessible and receive timely alerts if they’re not.
- Improved sector diffing for v1 contracts brings parity with v2 logic, reducing edge case complexity.
- Updated internal components to
coreutils v0.16.1, bringing enhanced protocol compatibility and security.
In addition to these backend upgrades, the browser experience for renters and developers continues to improve with certificate management handled behind the scenes.
walletd: Batch Endpoints & Consensus Enhancements
With the launch of walletd v2.10.0, developers gained new tools to query and manage large address sets with ease:
- Introduced batch endpoints for balances, events, outputs, and unconfirmed transactions.
- Expanded consensus checkpoints now allow lookups by block height, aiding explorers and sync tools.
- Added implicit proof filling for v2 transactions when in full index mode.
- Multiple cross-platform fixes improved SQLite stability, Windows compatibility, and broadcast resilience.
Together, these upgrades support large-scale integrations and improve node reliability under load.
explored: Faster Reverts, Better Metrics
May saw explored receive substantial upgrades focused on v2 contract visibility, indexing accuracy, and database performance:
- Fixed bugs preventing payout events and v2 metrics from being accurately indexed.
- Updated labeling logic to prevent incorrect state persistence on reverted contracts.
- Substantially improved revert speeds by eliminating inefficient cascade deletes.
- Introduced new benchmarking logic for siacoins, siafunds, and v1/v2 transactions.
These enhancements ensure explorers and dashboards reflect the most accurate and performant view of the Sia blockchain.
Ecosystem: Troubleshooting, Certificates, and Core Improvements
The broader Sia ecosystem saw the launch of several critical support services and tooling updates:
nomadwas deployed to provide SSL certificates and DDNS records for Sia hosts—auto-renewing and revoking stale entries every 180 days.troubleshootd, a new diagnostics daemon, helps storage providers resolve common connectivity issues using RHP protocol checks.vaultdfixed critical bugs in BIP39 seed phrase handling and enhanced support for long seeds.coreutilsandcorereceived compatibility updates for consensus v2 and cross-origin RHP4 support.
Together, these tools strengthen the foundation of the v2 network, reduce setup friction, and support a more scalable Sia infrastructure.
Grant Program Updates
Newly Approved Grants
- S5 Gateway & TypeScript Client: Jules Lai of Fabstir returns with a Skynet-inspired gateway and SDK for S5. This project offers simple REST routes and WebSocket subscriptions for developers, plus a browser/Node.js client for uploading, downloading, and managing registry entries without renterd-level complexity. It promises to bring back the one-call UX that made Skynet so compelling—now reimagined for S5 and Sia.
Progress Reports from Ongoing Grants
- Nydia Passkey Holder: The long-awaited encrypted passkey storage feature has been implemented as a proof-of-concept. Though not yet merged into the main branch, the architecture is solid, and refinement is underway. The team also reduced dependency bloat, simplified the build, and expanded browser support.
- SecureSphere - Decentralized Password Management: The SecureSphere browser extension reached full feature completion, boasting encrypted password management, breach monitoring, encrypted backups, and self-hosting support. Cross-platform testing is complete, positioning SecureSphere as a serious privacy-first tool.
- SiaGraph: A new Host Troubleshooter was released, including alert subscriptions. Renter analytics were paused in favor of network-wide stats that benefit the entire community. Work continues on the financial API layer and site improvements.
- Lume Web 2025: Significant backend and frontend refactors were completed to enable dynamic OpenAPI documentation and plugin development. New portal libraries, middleware, and testing frameworks were introduced to accelerate future module integration. Work on the dashboard and abuse plugins also progressed steadily.
- S5 Network: The developer behind S5 spent the month preparing stable 1.0 releases for all key libraries. These updates enable other S5-related grants to move forward and unlock features like stream messaging, new identifier formats, and data structures needed by Vup and other apps.
- Dartsia Mobile App v2: All planned milestones were completed, including a redesigned UI, integrated encryption, phone backup features, notifications, and a universal file viewer. The team is now exploring wallet and contract management features for future updates and has hinted at a new app for non-renterd users.
Final Thoughts
As we head into June, the v2 hardfork looms large as a moment of transformation. Sia is about to become the first Utreexo-native blockchain deployed in production. Combined with its new brand identity, browser-friendly infrastructure, and growing ecosystem of developers and dApps, the network stands ready to lead the decentralized cloud into its second decade.
If you haven’t yet, upgrade your node. The future is already syncing.
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.
