News from the SC Coin Development team on September 8, 2023
We’re back with the State of Sia, a monthly installment looking at development and team updates for The Sia Foundation.
With summer fully drawing to a close, we can focus on taking the next important steps for the Sia ecosystem to round out the year. We’re moving towards full releases of our app suite and looking beyond. Oliver, our new Developer Relations expert, is getting revved up and ready to go. We’re really excited to see his impact on Sia and the community.
We’ve got a team get-together coming up where we’ll be able to have some much needed face time, and sync up on a number of initiatives. In this world of remote work, sometimes it’s nice to work together.
Enough chatter, let’s get to the good stuff quick.
Object health is now cached in the database (Link)
New CLI flag to configure the number of slabs the autopilot reparis in parallel (Link)
Added a setting to bypass API authentication for downloads only (Link)
The MaxUploadPrice setting doesn’t account for storage cost and redundancy anymore, only for upload bandwidth since people found that to be confusing (Link)
This is a small collection of monthly changes. A full detailed changelog can be found here.
File upload and directory creation are now disabled until enough contracts are formed. (Link)
The failed to migrate slab alert now lists the associated objects/files. (Link)
The host explorer now has an interactive map. Filtered hosts can be selected via the list or map, and hosts on the map are colored based on whether renterd is actively contracting with the host. For hosts with active contracts the size of the hosts on the map is based on renterd’s used storage, for hosts without active contracts the size is based on the hosts remaining storage. (Link)
New users are now more clearly instructed to configure autopilot and to wait for enough contracts before files can be uploaded. (Link)
Node profile information now includes the build version. (Link)
The connectivity and login check no longer depends on consensus APIs which in some rare cases can be unresponsive. (Link)
Alerts now show contract additions and removals, formatted address, balance, and more. (Link)
Health percentage values are now clamped to a range of 0–100%. (Link)
File health tooltip now includes redundancy info and supports partial slabs. (Link)
The host explorer now works before autopilot is configured, the table shows the autopilot columns with empty values and tooltips explaining that autopilot is not configured. (Link)
Upload packing can now be enabled from the configuration tab. (Link)
The file stats do not show redundancy factor or health until there is at least 1 byte of data. (Link)
Fixed a crash issue when loading the hosts explorer. (Link)
Wallet balance is now more accurately calculated as spendable + unconfirmed. (Link)
hostd
hostd is the app you’ll be using to rent out your excess storage space to the Sia network. The hostd repo is public, with a beta out now.
Fixed underflow in collateral metrics when broadcasting storage proof for expired contracts (Link)
Added additional contract lifecycle tests to ensure contracts are completing correctly (Link)
Optimized storage location selection increasing performance around 2x for large nodes (Link)
Added caching to improve RPC performance when revising frequently used contracts. This is primarily noticeable when revising contracts storing more than 2TB of sectors (Link)
Fixed an issue with the No-IP DDNS provider when the IP address hasn’t changed (Link)
Added additional context and coloring to the CLI prompts to make them more user friendly (Link, Link)
hostd ui
This is a small collection of monthly changes. A full detailed changelog can be found here.
Fixed an issue where alert error messages were being cut off. Full error messages are now displayed above all other fields. (Link)
The connectivity and login check no longer depends on consensus APIs which in some rare cases can be unresponsive. (Link)
The contracts table now has an egress usage column. (Link)
walletd
walletd is our brand new wallet-only software. Find the public repo here.
Finished benchmarking walletd. There wasn't much (at least in the way of major performance improvements) to change.
walletd ui
This is a small collection of monthly changes. A full detailed changelog can be found here.
The connectivity and login check no longer depends on consensus APIs which in some rare cases can be unresponsive. (Link)
The app now warns the user if it is running on the testnet with a prominent banner. (Link)
Table headers now freeze in view when the table scrolls. (Link)
Fixed an issue where walletd would indefinitely report as “syncing” — the synced state is now based on the most recent block’s timestamp being within the last 2 hours. (Link)
The contrast was improved on the syncing progress text in the daemon profile. (Link)
We’ve made big strides on v2 in the its-happening branch (Link)
The consensus architecture has been refactored such that even v1 transactions do not require any I/O to process, which improves performance and allows for better isolation of consensus code (Link)
Added support for v2 transactions in the core transaction pool (Link)
Attestations (i.e. host announcements) will now be present in the v2 state accumulator, making it possible for a new node to efficiently retrieve a list of announced hosts without having to scan the entire blockchain (Link)
Multisig v2 addresses now support hiding the non-signing parties, improving privacy (Link)
Added some much-needed testing for the v2 validation functions (Link)
Reduced memory allocations in core to speed things up a little (Link)
Looking ahead
Publish siad to hostd migration utility
Stability on large nodes
S3 compatibility
Designing and implementing the gateway protocol for v2 nodes. This is already underway and we hope to have an MVP working soon. The protocol will probably go through a number of redesigns before launch.
That’s all folks
Thanks for your continued support and dedication as we build the foundation of the decentralized future.