Dev update for the week of April 12th

Published in

The Sia Blog

3 min readApr 22, 2021

News and updates on core team and community development from the past week. As always, if we’ve missed something important, let us know!

Important Updates

We’re kicking off our Skynet Dev Spotlight Series! Get to know gagdiez who created Wakio, a decentralized blogging platform built on Skynet! Try it here and check out their code walkthrough below.

In our second Skynet Dev Spotlight, we connected with Potatokins, the creator behind Zenbase, a storage adapter for GunDB (a decentralized database) Interview. Marissa’s Zenbase walkthrough covers writing elegant, efficient code (it’s just 55 lines), and technology integrations using Skynet as decentralized storage.

Sia gets an update

Sia v1.5.6 is ready! As a reminder, this is the final release of siad that includes Skynet-specific code. Going forward, Skynet functionality will only be available in the new skyd daemon, maintained by Skynet Labs. siad will retain existing renter/host/wallet/etc functionality. Starting next week, siad development will move to GitHub.

Other updates

Use the new “built with Skynet” badge to showcase on your Skapp or website! Download it on the updated Skynet Brand Guidelines page.

Hackathon Ideas

Our most recent hackathon is underway! Stuck for a hackathon idea? Check out David’s blog post for inspiration! All of the ideas presented should be possible within the 2 weekends remaining

From the community

Introducing Entropy Beacon

The Skynet Entropy Beacon provides securely generated randomness as a service for developers. Entropy beacons post signed pseudorandom data generated with urandom approximately every 30 seconds to Skynet. This can be used for generating seeds for decentralized apps such as games where you want to use random number generators but do not trust end-users to provide genuine randomness. Because the pseudorandom data is signed, users can be sure that other users are using noise from a neutral, authenticated source. Learn more.

Filebase delivers again

Filebase support for Skynet is now live! Read more about our latest network integration and pricing changes in our blog post.

The Skynet Wiki

The Skynet Wiki has been moved from wordpress to pure markdown and is being re-branded as Skynet Guide! This allows for community edits and multi-language support. Available on Skynet or https://skynet.guide/.

Github

Skynet Labs

skynet-js
#46 Marcin updated the SDK for v4.0.1-beta. Make sure to check out the documentation for notes on the changes.

skynet-accounts
#38 Ivo added unpinning functionality so users can unpin/delete files associated with their skynet account.

skystandards
#2 redsolver made some updates to the Feed DAC.

Gitlab

Skynet Labs

skyd
#73 Matt added NumLostFiles to the .siadir metadata so nodes.
#79 Chris introduced skylinks v2.
#82 fixed a bug in the skyfile metadata that was impacting some legacy links.
#88 Matt updated the module imports for skyd to gitlab.com/SkynetLabs/skyd.