Siacoin (SC)

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Historical price evolution of Siacoin

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

Siacoin originated from an idea conceived during the summer of 2013 by David Vorick, a Computer Science student at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Vorick developed the concept of decentralised storage through email exchanges with his friend Luke Champine, initially calling the project "Nimbus Network". In September 2013, Vorick formalised the concept during the HackMIT hackathon, drafting the first version of the whitepaper. The project was first renamed as "Bytecoin" and subsequently as "Sia", in reference to the Egyptian god of perception.

In January 2014, Vorick announced Sia on the BitcoinTalk forum. During April of the same year, Vorick and Champine applied to join the Y Combinator accelerator, but were rejected. In November 2014 they published the official Sia whitepaper and co-founded Nebulous Inc. in Boston. The company raised approximately $120,000 through a token sale and received an additional grant of $400,000 from INBlockchain during 2014.

On 6th June 2015, the genesis block of the Sia blockchain was mined, marking the official launch of the mainnet and the Siacoin (SC) token. Since its launch, the network has not experienced any period of downtime. Between 2017 and 2018, the project faced competition in mining hardware when Bitmain and Innosilicon developed ASICs compatible with Sia, competing with Nebulous's own hardware project called Obelisk. Innosilicon came to control 37.5% of the network's hashrate, which led the community to approve a hardfork in November 2018 to block Innosilicon miners. During this period, Nebulous raised $3.5 million in a pre-Series A round led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners and Dragonfly Capital Partners.

In 2019, Nebulous completed an additional seed round of $3 million led by Paradigm, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures and Dragonfly Capital Partners, reaching a total raised of $6.3 million. During this year, Pixeldrain, the first file-sharing service built on Sia, served more than 130,000 unique monthly visitors. In 2021, Nebulous split into two entities: Skynet Labs, a venture capital-backed company focused on decentralised web portals, and the Sia Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organisation with a mandate to develop the Sia protocol. The Foundation implemented a funding system through a subsidy mechanism encoded in the protocol, where each block generates an additional reward that goes directly to the foundation.

In August 2022, Skynet Labs announced the closure of operations after failing to secure funding in its next round, with CEO David Vorick communicating the decision publicly. The Sia Foundation absorbed key talent from Skynet Labs and reaffirmed its commitment to storage protocol development. During 2023, the Foundation launched hostd, a complete reimagining of the host software that replaces the legacy siad, offering better performance, data integrity and a modern web dashboard. In 2024, Luke Champine transitioned from his role as co-founder and president of the Sia Foundation to Blockchain Researcher, focusing on long-term research of the v2 hardfork and Utreexo integration, whilst Nate Maninger assumed executive leadership of the Foundation.

The tenth anniversary of the Sia mainnet, on 6th June 2025, marked the activation of Phase 1 of the v2 hardfork at block 526,000, making Sia the first blockchain with native Utreexo in production. This implementation replaced the large UTXO database with an ultra-compact cryptographic accumulator that reduces synchronisation time from days to minutes and enables running a node on low-resource or mobile devices. On 3rd July 2025, Phase 2 of the v2 hardfork was completed at block 530,000, completely disabling V1 transactions and introducing the new renter-host protocol RHP4 with greater speed and lower latency, in addition to improvements in storage contracts. The final version of the hardfork was completed in December 2025 at block 552,100.

Sia operates as a decentralised cloud storage network where anyone can act as a provider (host) offering unused disk space or as a client (renter) paying for storage in Siacoin (SC). Agreements between both parties are encoded as smart contracts directly on the Sia blockchain, eliminating intermediaries. When a user uploads a file, it is encrypted end-to-end on the client's device (only the owner possesses the keys), divided into 30 segments and distributed redundantly amongst 30 different hosts. This architecture guarantees high availability: to recover the complete file, only 10 of the 30 segments need to be available, ensuring access to data even when some hosts are inactive or disconnected.

The system incorporates economic incentive mechanisms to maintain service integrity. Hosts must lock SC as collateral in each contract: if they do not properly maintain the stored file, they lose that collateral, whilst renters pay for the service in SC. Siacoin has no maximum supply, a design justified by its nature as a utility token intended to pay storage contracts in a digital data ecosystem with potentially unlimited growth. The blockchain uses Proof of Work with SHA-256 algorithm for consensus and, after the v2 hardfork implemented between June and December 2025, adopted Utreexo: instead of maintaining the complete UTXO state database, it employs a compact cryptographic accumulator that allows verifying transactions with only a few megabytes on disk, enabling full nodes to run on mobile devices or low-performance hardware and favouring decentralisation. The v2 hardfork also introduces RHP4, the new renter-host communication protocol with greater parallelism and lower latency in data transfers. Protocol development is managed by the Sia Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organisation that finances itself through block rewards encoded in the protocol itself, maintaining independence from external investors.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.