Siacoin (SC) surged by 20% in 24 hours as liquidity circulated around the $2 trillion cryptocurrency market.
Siacoin is a native token decentralized cloud storage blockchain Sia launched in 2015 to allow users to rent unused storage. SC’s market capitalization rose to $733 million as the price rose, with daily trading volume surging 38% to nearly $200 million per CoinMarketCap.
One of the fundamental missions of cryptocurrency is to solve the problems of traditional and centralized services. In keeping with this ethos, Sia plans to provide trustless access to secure cloud storage at competitive prices compared to larger players such as Amazon and Google.
Data uploaded to Sia’s blockchain is distributed across 30 encrypted hosts. A minimum of 10 hosts are required for the network to remain operational to support data retrieval. Users pay a fee to the host of the SC, and the decentralized storage lessor locks the tokens as collateral through a smart contract.
Siacoin operates on a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus system, with miners adding new blocks to the network and issuing new coins. Bitcoin (BTC) is also built on the PoW model. The idea is to harden Sia’s blockchain against malicious actors and hackers, as this on-chain architecture requires expensive hardware and energy efforts to attempt attacks.
Blockchain has become the go-to technology for providing cloud storage due to its cost-effectiveness and borderless access. Matt Henderson, chief strategy officer at Aurora Labs, said blockchain makes an ideal combination for cloud storage as it provides flexibility, improves efficiency and ensures optimization.