Siacoin SC / Siacoin

What Is Siacoin (SC)?

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.

Who Are the Founders of Siacoin?

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.

What Makes Siacoin Unique?

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.