Sia is a decentralized cloud storage platform that aims to compete with existing storage solutions, both at the peer-to-peer and enterprise levels. Instead of renting storage from a centralized provider, peers on Sia rent storage from each other. Sia itself only stores the storage contracts formed between parties, which define the terms of their arrangement. A blockchain, similar to Bitcoin [1, 12], is used for this purpose. The Sia blockchain enables this marketplace to operate without an intermediary. Sia secures storage transactions with smart contracts, providing a more reliable and affordable alternative compared to traditional cloud providers. No single person, organization, miner, developer, or government can censor or deny access to data.

Siacoin (SC) is the native utility token of Sia, a blockchain-based distributed, decentralized cloud storage platform. Sia acts as a secure, trustless marketplace for cloud storage in which users can lease access to their unused storage space. Agreements and transactions are enforced with smart contracts, and Siacoin is the medium of exchange for paying for storage on the network. The main goal of the project is to become the "backbone storage layer of the internet."

Sia was originally announced in May 2014 before being revised and re-announced a year later in May 2015. It officially launched in June 2015.

Sia was first conceived in mid-2013 by David Vorick while studying computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He discussed the idea over email with Luke Champine, a college friend, who joined the project's development shortly after Vorick presented the concept at a HackMIT hackathon in September 2013. The project was officially named Sia in early 2014, a reference to the Egyptian god of perception. They formed the company Nebulous, Inc., which were the primary developers of Sia until the founding of The Sia Foundation in 2021.

The Sia Foundation, a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization based in the US, is now the steward of the Sia project. The goals and responsibilities of the Foundation are numerous: to maintain core Sia protocols and consensus code; to support developers building on top of Sia and its protocols; to promote Sia and facilitate partnerships in other spheres and communities; to ensure that users can easily acquire and safely store siacoins; to develop network scalability solutions; to implement hardforks and lead the community through them; and much more.

The Sia Foundation is funded via a block-subsidy, and has a lively grants program started in October of 2022. The goal of the Grants Program is to fund new projects that utilize Sia in some way to benefit the network and ecosystem.

According to its whitepaper, the long-term goal of Sia is to compete with existing storage solutions. It sees itself as being in direct competition with major cloud storage providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Because of its decentralized nature, Sia is able to offer competitive storage rates.

Files stored on the Sia network are divided into 30 encrypted segments, with each segment uploaded to a unique host for redundancy. The agreements between uploaders and hosts are recorded on Sia's blockchain and enforced using smart contracts. Siacoin acts as the method of payment on the network, with renters paying hosts using SC, and hosts locking SC in smart contracts as collateral.

Siacoin has no maximum supply. Because it is a utility token designed to be used to power transactions via smart contracts, the project has stated that there must be a limitless supply in order to match the effectively limitless amount of data that can be created and stored.

New Siacoins are introduced as mining rewards through the Sia blockchain's proof-of-work mining algorithm. The mining reward started at 300,000 SC and decreased at a rate of 1 SC with each block mined until it reached 30,000 SC in July 2020. The block reward will now forever remain 30,000 SC. With the launch of The Sia Foundation, the block reward was doubled, with the additional 30,000 SC per block going to the Foundation on a monthly basis.

Siacoin is removed from the ecosystem when hosts lose tokens or their collateral is left unrefunded due to bad actions. In the future, the development team intends to introduce a proof-of-burn mechanism by which hosts will be required to burn a small percentage of their revenue to prove that they are real and have good intentions.

The Sia development team mined approximately 100 blocks (around 30 million SC) before publicly releasing the mining algorithm. The platform's team and investors reportedly hold less than 0.1% of the total Siacoin supply.

The Sia blockchain is secured using a proof-of-work consensus algorithm, meaning that miners compete among each other to add new blocks to the blockchain and a majority must confirm a record for it to be posted. Sia co-founder Vorick argued in June 2017 that proof-of-work is the best way to secure the network because it tethers a malicious actor's ability to attack the network to massive energy requirements and hardware expenses.

According to Sia's development team, the fact that hosts have to put up collateral in order to participate in the network's operations decreases any incentive for bad actors. In addition, it has pointed to the fact that it splits uploaded data into 30 segments, which are then distributed across the globe, as reassurance that its network cannot be taken down except in the event of a massive natural disaster or geopolitical event. And as long as 10 out of 30 hosts survive an attack on its network, files can still be retrieved.

Siacoin can be purchased on cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance, OKEx, Huobi Global and Upbit, among others. It can be traded on spot markets against fiat currencies such as the U.S. dollar and the South Korean won, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), and the stablecoin Tether (USDT).

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