New year, new Sia. January has been an interesting month, to say the least. We’ve got amazing new branding with a polished look and feel. We’ve unveiled a redesigned website which is cleaner and explains our mission better than ever. And we’ve made important decisions about the future of the platform, with your input.

If you’re new to Sia — and there are a lot of you who are — hello! Our team and community welcome you. I’m spoiling a little bit of our first topic with this link, but you can learn about our team and the broad strokes of our project here. There will also be a section of important links at the bottom of the post.

In this update

Our new look The exchange situation Developer’s corner Help wanted By the numbers

Our new look

In case you’ve missed it, Sia is brand new. We’ve got a complete re-brand that establishes a clean and powerful message that will take us through 2018 and beyond. This is about the Sia Storage Platform, the world’s foremost completely decentralized storage project. More affordable and more secure than any alternative.

Of course, we still have a lot of work to do on these fronts. But this new site does a much better job of explaining our mission and goals, and getting our users information they’ll need to succeed with our product.

The exchange situation

After an awful lot of hard, specialized work from our dev team, Bittrex is back. We know this was really important to you, and it was really important to us too. Bittrex hovers in the top 10 exchanges by total volume, and having our token functional on their service was crucial moving forward. We also were able to write a ton of new code for scaling our wallet, which are issues that only an exchange would be able to find.

We’re working to resolve issues with the other exchanges that offer Siacoin whenever we are able. As you can imagine, their support teams are constantly under fire. Even getting in contact with them can be a feat, and then getting in touch with their developers is another hurdle. Further, some exchanges just don’t seem to care whether their wallets are functional or not. That’s not something we can control, but we can help thin the problem out by being proactive in getting Siacoin on more exchanges.

CoinSwitch, a Shapeshift-esque marketplace, recently added us to their system.

Since their listing for Siacoin is relatively new, we recommend caution at this time. Their transactions seem to be processing properly, but if you have any experience with their service and can provide some feedback to me, that’d be helpful in determining if they are a reliable option moving forward.

As David has mentioned before, exchanges are incredibly powerful. As a developer of a coin, getting in the right place could mean an amazing bounce in attention for your project. And depending on the development team’s motives, they may have varying tolerances for paying a listing fee.

We’ve never felt that a listing fee was fair. Exchanges make tons of money off of the service they provide. If a project and the team behind it are solid, listing a coin will pay for itself quickly. That money is better spent on people and progress.

Considering the above, if you work for an exchange and want to list Siacoin you can reach out directly to me.

Updates from the…

Over the past month, 37 new pieces of code were merged and 63 issues were closed across 2 Nebulous repos.

And then of course, the website.

I mentioned this in my fill-in for tbenz9 during his weekly developers update, but it’s worth mentioning again. I’d like to thank Luxor for their work in making our new website something to be proud of.

I think the new design speaks a lot towards our philosophy. We want to do things right. That means getting our software into people’s hands, and educating them about our technology. The links at the top of the site let you learn about our team, our tech, and our goals.

Soon, we’ll be revamping Sia-UI with help from Luxor as well. I’m incredibly excited for this, having spent the larger part of my career teaching people how to use software. Sia-UI has served us well for a while now, but the user experience could be improved. Once we dive in and get to work, we’ll have the premiere software in the blockchain space.

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.

Help wanted

David recently posted four full time job openings with Sia. I’ll leave it to him:

I’m happy to announce that we are currently hiring for 4 full time positions. We strongly prefer that all full time employees move to Boston with us. If you would like to apply, please send me a private message. For the first position, we are looking for a developer who can help us build out and improve our test infrastructure, which would include working on our ant-farm as well as helping to launch a test-net. For the second position, we are looking for a golang developer who has experience working with disk I/O, and in particular ACID paradigms. For the third position, we are looking for a back-end engineer to help us optimize some of algorithms and datastructures that power Sia. Finally, we are looking for an open source liason who will work closely with all of the open source applications being built on Sia, learning their needs, helping them get off the ground, and helping the core team to set priorities around the roadmap.

By the numbers

We continue the trend of fantastic growth across our channels.

Facebook: up 36%

Twitter: up 41%

Reddit: up 31%

Discord: up 60%

I have a process I’ll be taking our communities through in the coming weeks, to ensure that we’re meeting the needs of our users and moderators. We’ll be revamping rules, adding mods, and making sure that we have plans in place that can scale with our community. We’ll be adding one final piece to the social network puzzle soon, and it should double as a high quality resource. More on that later.

The wrap up

And so ends another community update. This is the first one that I’ve written since becoming a full-time employee of this company. Personally, I’ve never had such fulfilling work. Dealing with the community every day and focusing on building quality support channels has been refreshing. I hope you’ll begin to see improvements in both of these things.

Finally, I want to thank everyone for their thoughts and passion as we made our decision regarding Bitmain and the soft-fork. We did not make it lightly. We’ll move forward, together, and build the best platform we can.

A special thanks to our Discord moderators for expressing their thoughts while maintaining an unbiased approach to the community.

Links

Sia, yours truly

Luxor, developers of the new site

Join Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook

Steve