The State of Sia, November 2025

November brought several important updates from the Sia Foundation, including two major announcements that all community members, contributors, and grantees should be aware of.

Firstly, the last grant committee meeting of the year was on December 9th. Normal operations will resume on January 14th. During this recess, the Grants Committee will pause operations—meaning no meetings, no monthly reviews, and no expected progress or final reports until the review cycle resumes on January 25th. Those planning to submit new proposals should note the updated deadlines. All proposals must be posted by January 14th to be considered in the first Grants meeting of 2026. This scheduling update ensures transparency and helps both new and ongoing grantees plan their work accordingly.

The second major announcement is a policy change to grant licensing requirements. Effective November 28th, all new grant-funded software must be released under a license compliant with the Open Source Initiative, and grantees must clearly specify the license in their repository via a README.md statement or LICENSE file. The Foundation itself uses MIT, but grantees may choose any OSI-compliant option. While this requirement applies only to newly awarded grants, the Foundation encourages all developers to adopt open-source best practices.

Alongside these operational updates, the Sia ecosystem continued to advance across core software, mobile applications, and community-driven projects. New versions of hostd and renterd were released this month; stability improvements were deployed across multiple repositories; and the Grants Program saw several major projects reach their final milestones.

Development Updates

indexd: Major Reliability Fixes, Contract Workflow Refinements & New Data Controls

Development on indexd continued at a rapid pace this month, with a focus on improving contract syncing, collateral handling, pruning issues, and per-application data control. These updates significantly improve reliability across migration, pinning, account funding, host interactions, and state management. While indexd is not yet publicly available, a public release is expected soon.

Core Updates:

• Added wallet maintenance to split large UTXOs for contract formation.
• Added exponential backoff to slab repair.
• Added protections to prevent contracts from drifting unsynced; mark unsynced contracts as bad.
• Improved migration performance via randomized download candidates and parallel shard uploads.
• Added integrity check stats reporting.
• Added per-app-key pinned data exposure and data limits.
• Excluded full hosts from upload candidate lists during migrations.
• Added filtering of /accounts by connect key.
• Associate accounts with their connect key in the DB.
• Only fund accounts tied to active hosts.
• Removed store mocks from host tests.
• Detect whether the seed phrase has changed and prevent startup if a mismatch is detected.
• Improved AppendSectors error messaging.
• Logging improvements and updated Prometheus labeling for blocked hosts.

UI Updates:

• Refactored UI to remove contract list location data and move it to individual contract panels.
• Added host location typings.
• Removed explorer dependency in favor of native host typing.

Sia Storage: Major Sync System Enhancements & Mobile Experience Upgrades

The Sia Storage mobile app saw a wide-reaching overhaul this month, improving reliability, metadata consistency, multi-device support, and Android/iOS parity. This work significantly advanced the app toward a smooth, predictable sync and upload experience across large media libraries.

Core Updates:

• App renamed to Sia Storage and updated with the official app key.
• SHA-256 content hashes have been adopted as universal file identifiers, enabling stable multi-device sync and deduplication.
• Improved asset import flow with standardized metadata handling, better MIME detection, duplicate checks, and consistent hashing.
• Local file storage migrated from temporary cache to durable application documents directory (with data migration).
• Metadata now fully synced across devices, with “last update wins” behavior. Uploads stream directly from disk instead of memory, improving scalability and reliability.
• Added background upload task support for both iOS and Android.
• Added system for tracking last-used timestamps and evicting stale local files when storage thresholds are exceeded.
• Added cleanup service for orphaned files.

UI Updates:

• Thumbnails have been added to all photos and videos, improving gallery rendering.
• New app status sheet with granular upload breakdowns and local file stats.
• Custom splash screen added, with detailed initialization steps and migration progress tracking.

hostd: Contract Reliability, Protocol Hardening & Stability Improvements

Development on hostd this month strengthened contract renewal behavior, improving revision integrity, and enhancing error handling across several key workflows. These updates shipped as part of hostd v2.5.1.

Core Updates:

• Added wallet-seed-change rescans to maintain proper state after key updates.
• Fixed contract renewal failures when capacity > size.
• Correct RPC error now returned when the host is out of storage.
• Hardened t to prevent revision number rollback attacks.
• Archive v1 contracts correctly once the proof window closes.
• Fixed RPCFreeSectors NDF handling.
• Updated coreutils to v0.18.6.
• QUIC connections are now monitored and rate-limited for accurate bandwidth accounting.

renterd: Improved Consensus Handling & Dependency Updates

renterd development this month focused on improving consensus state robustness and keeping core dependencies aligned with recent upstream updates.  These updates shipped in renterd v2.7.1.

Core Updates:

• renterd now resets the chain state automatically if consensus.db is missing, preventing malformed state issues.
• Upgraded core to v0.18.0 and coreutils to v0.18.6 for improved protocol compatibility and performance.

UI Updates:

• Removed the slab key label from the health tooltip to simplify the interface.

core: Foundational Performance Improvement

This month’s core work focused on boosting performance in low-level consensus routines. By parallelizing sector-root computation, components that depend on frequent Merkle operations, such as hosts, renters, and indexers, will benefit from faster and more efficient processing.

Core Updates:

• Parallelized computation of sector roots, improving performance for operations requiring Merkle root aggregation.

coreutils: Collateral Validation Fixes & QUIC Connection Improvements

Work in coreutils focused on improving protocol reliability and connection stability, ensuring that higher-level components like renterd and hostd operate on more consistent and resilient infrastructure

Core Updates:

• Corrected validation logic for maximum collateral during contract refreshes involving partial rollovers.
• Enabled QUIC keepalives to improve the stability of long-running connections.

s3d: Expanded S3 Compatibility & Backend Integration

s3d saw significant progress toward full S3 compatibility, adding key API routes and deeper integration with Sia-backed storage systems. These improvements make it easier for existing S3-based applications to migrate to or interoperate with Sia.

Core Updates:

• Implemented DeleteObjects and CopyObject routes.
• Built a reader for unsigned payload requests.
• Added Sia SDK integration to the Sia backend.
• Implemented additional bucket and object features for Sia-backed storage.

react-native-sia: Android Support & Package Size Improvements

Development on react-native-sia improved mobile platform support and reduced package size.

Core Updates:

• Achieved full Android compatibility.
• Switched to release builds of indexd_ffi, reducing package size.

Grants Program Updates

Newly Approved Grants

• SMB – Indexer Support: This grant builds on prior SMB protocol work by integrating SMB dialects into indexd, enabling direct SMB access to Sia-backed storage.

Progress Reports from Ongoing Grants

• Lume Web – LBRY Integration: This month saw major progress, including a forked LBRY DHT, creation of liblbry, and continued development of the portal plugin. Deep DHT reliability issues were resolved, and the next focus will be on frontend UI integration.
• Where – Crowd-Powered Location Insight App: The team migrated location and comment data storage to Sia using s5 and transitioned from zen to mainnet.

Final Progress Reports

• S5 Gateway & TypeScript Client: All milestones are now complete, including a comprehensive documentation suite, demo scripts, screencast, and upstream PR submission. The enhanced SDK is already powering real-world production workloads and exceeds performance, size, and testing requirements.
• S5 Rewrite in Rust: The S5 protocol has been fully re-architected in Rust with v1.0-beta.1, including FUSE integration, new encrypted filesystem features, and cross-language bindings.
• DecaNotes – Private Decentralized Notes: The project delivered a full-featured Markdown editor with block-based editing, renterd integration, improved UX, version reporting, and robust save logic.
• Cypherock X1 – Sia Hardware Wallet Integration: The final milestone is complete with the release of new firmware and cySync software. Comprehensive user guides and step-by-step video tutorials have been released to ensure a smooth onboarding process for all users. Cypherrock’s integration marks a major step forward for secure Siacoin hardware custody.

Final Thoughts

November advanced Sia’s codebase, applications, and developer ecosystem. With the new releases of hostd and renterd, significant mobile app refinements, and impactful grant completions—including two large S5-related projects—the building blocks of a more powerful and accessible decentralized storage network continue to solidify.

As we move into the holiday season and temporary recess, the ecosystem is in a strong position, with multiple tools reaching production readiness and new integrations expanding the reach and usability of Sia’s decentralized infrastructure.

We look forward to seeing continued innovation in the new year.

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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