A Deep Dive Into DePin (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure)

8 Things to Know About Bear Markets

What Is Siacoin? Features and Tokenomics 

## What Is Siacoin (SC)?

Siacoin (SC) is the native utility token of Sia, a [blockchain](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/blockchain)-based distributed, decentralized cloud [storage](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/storage-decentralized) 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](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/smart-contract), and Siacoin is the medium of exchange for paying for storage on the network. The main [goal](https://sia.tech/about) of the project is to become the "backbone storage layer of the internet."

Sia was originally [announced](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=591283.0) in May 2014 before being revised and [re-announced](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1060294.0) a year later in May 2015. It officially [launched](https://twitter.com/NebulousLabs/status/607639984489811969) in June 2015.


### Who Are the Founders of Siacoin?

Sia was first [conceived](https://siawiki.tech/about/history_of_sia) 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](https://sia.tech/about-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](https://sia.tech/grants) 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](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/whitepaper), the long-term [goal](https://sia.tech/sia.pdf) of Sia is to compete with existing storage solutions. It [sees](https://blog.sia.tech/meet-sia-the-most-viable-non-financial-application-of-blockchain-technology-afe6e7412a25) 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](https://blog.sia.tech/cloud-storage-for-2-tb-mo-8a34043e93bb) competitive storage rates.

Files [stored](https://sia.tech/technology) 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.


#### **Related Pages**:

Learn about [Filecoin](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/filecoin/), a decentralized storage system that seeks to store "humanity’s most important information."

Learn about [MaidSafeCoin](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/maidsafecoin/), the currency of the SAFE decentralized data network.

Stay up to date on the latest innovations in blockchain and decentralized storage with the [CoinMarketCap blog](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/categories/blog).


#### How Many Siacoin (SC) Coins Are There in Circulation?

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](https://support.sia.tech/article/TziYOGhl38-siacoins-total-supply) 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](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake) 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](https://siastats.info/block_reward) 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](https://trello.com/c/xynwRelr/56-add-proof-of-burn-mechanic-to-hosts) 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](https://siawiki.tech/wallet/siacoin) 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.


### How Is the Siacoin Network Secured?

The Sia blockchain is secured using a proof-of-work [consensus](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/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](https://blog.sia.tech/choosing-asics-for-sia-b318505b5b51) 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](https://blog.sia.tech/addressing-thoughtful-concerns-about-sias-security-viability-103ccfff5e92) 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.


### Where Can You Buy Siacoin (SC)?

Siacoin can be purchased on cryptocurrency exchanges such as [Binance](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/binance/), [OKEx](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/okex/), [Huobi Global](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/huobi-global/) and [Upbit](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/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](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin) (BTC) and [Ether](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum) (ETH), and the [stablecoin](https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/article/what-is-a-stablecoin) [Tether](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/) (USDT).

Are you interested in buying Siacoin or other cryptocurrencies such as [Bitcoin](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitcoin)? CoinMarketCap has a simple, [step-by-step guide](https://coinmarketcap.com/how-to-buy-bitcoin/) to teach you all about crypto and how to buy your first coins.


Binance

Siacoin

Ledger

Trezor

Trust Wallet

Math Wallet

Sia.UI

The Sia Foundation develops Sia, the trustless cloud storage marketplace allowing buyers and sellers to transact directly.

Holo is a peer-to-peer distributed platform for hosting decentralized applications built using Holochain, a framework for developing DApps that does not require the use of blockchain technology. The goal of Holo is to serve as a bridge between the broader internet and apps built using Holochain, offering an ecosystem and marketplace in which DApps are easily accessible, as they are hosted on the internet by Holo network participants.

The Holo network will be facilitated using a token called HoloFuel, which is actively being tested and will act as an accounting system to pay hosts for their services. In 2018, the project minted an ERC-20 token, HOT — also known as HoloToken — as an "IOU" that will be redeemable for HoloFuel upon launch.

Holo is still in development and is expected to launch for open alpha and beta testing by 2021.

Holo

Zilliqa is a public, permissionless blockchain that is designed to offer high throughput with the ability to complete thousands of transactions per second. It seeks to solve the issue of blockchain scalability and speed by employing sharding as a second-layer scaling solution. The platform is home to many decentralized applications, and as of October 2020, it also allows for staking and yield farming.

Development work officially started on Zilliqa in June 2017, and its testnet went live in March 2018. A little over a year later, in June 2019, the platform launched its mainnet.

The native utility token of Zilliqa, ZIL, is used to process transactions on the network and execute smart contracts.

Zilliqa

DigiByte (DGB) is an open source blockchain and asset creation platform. Development began in October 2013 and the genesis block of its DGB token was mined in January 2014 as a fork of Bitcoin (BTC).

A longstanding public blockchain and cryptocurrency, DigiByte uses five different algorithms to improve security, and originally aimed to improve on the Bitcoin blockchain’s security, capacity and transaction speed.

DigiByte consists of three layers: a smart contract “App Store,” a public ledger and the core protocol featuring nodes communicating to relay transactions.

DigiByte

NEM is a blockchain platform that was launched in March of 2015. It was one of the pioneers of the cryptocurrency industry, and sought to improve on the imperfections found on other chains at the time. It was one of the first non-turing complete chains to feature user-defined tokens (called mosaics), namespaces, multisignature accounts, and a P2P reputation system based on EigenTrust++. Its most notable contribution to the space is the proof-of-importance consensus mechanism, which sought to reward on-chain activity and deter the concentration of wealth commonly associated with proof-of-stake. Its client, NIS, is written in Java.

NEM has a global community. It sees the most utility as an alternative form of payment for businesses and vendors, and has a variety of social media apps built on top of it in Japan, such as nemgraph, a community-driven owned and operated alternative to Instagram.

In December 2021, NEM was hard forked by a pseudonymous team of cryptocurrency experts and enthusiasts alike. Titled Harlock, this hard fork signaled the community’s intent to take NEM from a shadow of its former self into the world’s leading payments platform for on-chain and off-chain media content.

Launched in 2017, Dent is a revolutionary digital mobile operator offering eSIM cards, mobile data plans, call minutes top-ups and a roaming-free experience. According to the company website, Dent employs blockchain technology’s powers to create a global marketplace for mobile data liberalization.

Dent has an ambitious roadmap ahead, with plans to expand its services to new markets by the end of 2021. The company has already attracted more than twenty-five million mobile device users, and Dent services are available in more than 140 countries. Enterprise partnerships for Dent include Samsung Blockchain, The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and Telecom Infra.

Dent

Harmony is a blockchain platform designed to facilitate the creation and use of decentralized applications (DApps). The network aims to innovate the way decentralized applications work by focusing on random state sharding, which allows creating blocks in seconds.

According to the project’s website, Harmony is expected to introduce cross-shard contracts and a cross-chain infrastructure by the end of 2021.

Harmony

IOST describes itself as an “ultra-fast,” fully fledged and decentralized blockchain network and ecosystem with its own nodes, wallets and based on the “next-generation” consensus protocol dubbed “proof-of-believability.”

IOST

IOTA is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) that features unique architecture and an open-source product suite for individuals, businesses, and institutions to use in Web3. It is built on a directed acyclic graph (DAG) called the Tangle, which can be pictured as a multi-dimensional blockchain. It enables the exchange of data and value on a decentralized platform through direct and secure transfers, executed on and immutably recorded on the network.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive into IOTA.

Together with its staging network Shimmer, IOTA aims to offer solutions to establish a secure and permissionless infrastructure that can drive the economy of the future. It enables the development of decentralized applications through automated trust in the form of Ethereum-compatible smart contracts, an advanced consensus algorithm, and thoughtfully balanced incentives.

IOTA delivers tools for creating and managing custom Layer 2 (EVM) chains, deploying smart contracts, minting native tokens and NFTs with distinctive features, and introducing digital identities to users.

Launching in 2024, IOTA 2.0 will be a protocol upgrade that rebuilds IOTA’s architecture to deliver full decentralization. You can find more about it here.

IOTA

What Is Ankr (ANKR)?

Ankr is a decentralized blockchain infrastructure provider that operates an array of nodes globally distributed across over 50 Proof-of-Stake networks. This infrastructure helps drive the growth of the crypto economy while powering a full suite of multi-chain tools for Web3 users:

Ankr Build
Ankr provides comprehensive blockchain developer solutions, including traditional APIs, a decentralized multi-chain network of public RPC nodes used to access blockchain data and execute code, and tools like Ankr Scan to view on-chain information across blockchains.

Ankr Earn
Ankr Earn makes staking, liquid staking, and other yield-earning opportunities easy and accessible to any crypto investor. Ankr creates the most scalable and decentralized staking infrastructure solution that aims to solve the capital inefficiency of Proof-of-Stake networks and similar blockchain consensus mechanisms.

Ankr Learn
Through Ankr’s learning tools, tutorials, and docs, anyone can become a better user or developer of blockchain-based systems.

Ankr

VeChainThor (VET) is a versatile enterprise-grade L1 smart contract platform whose origins began in 2015. VeChain is known as a pioneer of real-world enterprise applications, and built a distributed platform powered by Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, NFC chips and blockchain to help various industries solve data-related challenges.

VeChain solves major blockchain adoption hurdles. The platform uses an intelligent two token model, VET and VTHO, separating the protocol's Store of Value and gas fee payment mechanisms, ensuring costs can be kept low and stable. Fee delegation allows smart contracts to pay gas fees on behalf of business users, and an advanced transaction model allows data to be packaged more efficiently while ensuring finality of data.

VeChain is focused on delivering a wave of incentive-based sustainability dApps through its new platform, VeBetterDAO, working closely with Boston Consulting Group to achieve adoption across enterprise and individual users, and helping  onboard the next billion users to Web3 over the coming decade.

From supply chains to sustainability, VeChain has continuously demonstrated its leading role as a driver of blockchain in business, and is dedicated to its role as a pioneer of driving real world adoption of blockchain technology.

VeChain

Chiliz is the leading digital currency for sports and entertainment by the eponymous Malta-based FinTech provider. It operates the blockchain-based sports entertainment platform Socios, which enables users to participate in the governance of their favorite sports brands. Multiple fan tokens by Socios.com are an example of that. For sports clubs and associations, fan tokens offer a way of connecting with their fans and unlocking new revenue streams.

For instance, fans can participate and influence club-related decisions through surveys and polls, such as messages the captain should wear on his armband. The company aims to bridge the gap between being an active and a passive fan. Chiliz has developed partnerships with some of the biggest sporting institutions in the world: FC Barcelona, Manchester City, Juventus Turin, and Paris Saint-Germain. It also boasts partnerships with the UFC and gaming organizations. By purchasing CHZ, fans get access to various fan tokens and literally have a stake in their club.

Chiliz

Verge is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency and blockchain that seeks to offer a fast, efficient, decentralized payments network that improves upon the original Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain. It includes additional privacy features including integrating the anonymity network Tor into its wallet, called vergePay, and providing the option of sending transactions to stealth addresses.

The project describes itself as community-driven, relying on volunteers and priding itself on being open source.

Verge was first launched in October 2014 as DogeCoinDark, a fork of Peercoin (PPC). In February 2016, it was renamed Verge in order to rebrand for easier mass-market adoption and to distinguish itself from Dogecoin (DOGE), with which it has no direct connection. The project is now based on the Bitcoin source code.

Verge

Ravencoin is a digital peer-to-peer (P2P) network that aims to implement a use case specific blockchain, designed to efficiently handle one specific function: the transfer of assets from one party to another. Built on a fork of the Bitcoin code, Ravencoin was announced on Oct. 31, 2017 and released binaries for mining on Jan. 3, 2018 with what is called a fair launch: no premine, ICO or masternodes. It was named in reference to a TV show Game of Thrones.

Ravencoin

Basic Attention Token, or BAT, is the token that powers a new blockchain-based digital advertising platform designed to fairly reward users for their attention, while providing advertisers with a better return on their ad spend.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Basic Attention Token.

This experience is delivered through the Brave Browser, where users can watch privacy-preserving adverts and receive BAT rewards for doing so. On the other hand, advertisers can deliver targeted ads to maximize engagement and cut down losses due to ad fraud and abuse.

The Basic Attention Token itself is the unit of reward in this advertising ecosystem, and is exchanged between advertisers, publishers and users. Advertisers pay for their advertising campaigns in BAT tokens. Out of this budget, a small portion is distributed to advertisers, while 70% is distributed to users — whereas the intermediaries that typically drive up advertising costs are cut out of the equation to improve cost-efficiency.

Basic Attention Token launched in 2017 following one of the fastest sell-out initial coin offerings (ICOs) of all time, with the platform raising a total of $35 million in under a minute. Since then, it has rolled out its attention-based advertising experience to users in most countries through its Brave Rewards program.

As of November 2020, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada had the most active advertising campaigns.

Basic Attention Token

Storj, pronounced as “storage,” is an open-source cloud storage platform. Basically, it uses a decentralized network of nodes to host user data. The platform also secures hosted data using advanced encryption.

In a white paper published in December,2014, Storj was first introduced to the world as a concept. It was to be a decentralized peer-to-peer encrypted cloud storage platform.

Two years later, an updated white paper was published. Here, a decentralized network  — connecting users who need cloud storage space with those who have hard drive space to sell — was described. The platform was launched in late 2018.

People with hard drive space and good internet connectivity can participate in the network. They become a unit in the network, called a node. Space providers are rewarded by Storj tokens.

Storj

Enjin Coin is a project of Enjin, a company that provides an ecosystem of interconnected, blockchain-based gaming products. Enjin's flagship offering is the Enjin Network, a social gaming platform through which users can create websites and clans, chat, and host virtual item stores.

Enjin allows game developers to tokenize in-game items on the Ethereum blockchain. It uses Enjin Coin, an ERC-20 token, to back the digital assets issued using its platform, meaning that items can be bought, sold and traded with real-world value.

Enjin Coin was first announced in July 2017, and it launched on the Ethereum mainnet in June 2018.

Enjin Coin (ENJ) is a digital store of value used to back the value of blockchain assets like non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Every asset minted with the Enjin Platform contains ENJ, a minting resource which is locked inside NFTs and removed from circulation. Minting blockchain assets with ENJ provides a variety of benefits to creators and users:

Infuses them with a reserve value

Ensures their transparency and scarcity

Gives them instant liquidity

Provides utility in games and apps

Anti-inflationary

Enjin's "melting" functionality allows users to destroy their blockchain assets at any time to retrieve the ENJ value from within.

The Enjin blockchain ecosystem aims to offer software products that make it easy for everyone to develop, trade, monetize, and market with blockchain.

Founded in 2009, Enjin has roots in the gaming industry, with the company’s first product, a gaming community platform called the Enjin Network, growing to 20 million users over the course of a decade.

In 2017 following an ICO, Enjin established itself as a leading blockchain ecosystem developer, building a suite of software products that enable anyone to easily mint, manage, trade, distribute, and integrate blockchain assets.

Enjin’s co-founder Witek Radomski wrote the code for one of the first ever non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and is also the co-author of the ERC-1155 Ethereum token standard.

Built on top of an on-chain infrastructure, the Enjin ecosystem enables game developers and businesses of all sizes to use tokenized digital assets as part of their acquisition, retention, engagement, and monetization strategies. The Enjin ecosystem is fueled by Enjin Coin (ENJ), a cryptocurrency used to back the value of blockchain assets.

Enjin Coin

Ontology is a project designed to bring trust, privacy, and security to Web3 through decentralized identity and data solutions. It is building the infrastructure to provide trusted access to Web3, allowing individuals and enterprises to rest assured that through regulatory compliant digital identity solutions, users and their privacy come first.

The Ontology blockchain is a high speed, low cost public blockchain. It is designed to bring decentralized identity and data solutions to Web3, with the goal of increasing privacy, transparency, and trust. To achieve this, users and enterprises are provided with the flexibility to build blockchain-based solutions that suit their needs, while also ensuring regulatory compliance. Through Ontology’s Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), Ontology ensures frictionless compatibility with Ethereum, the first step in the creation of the Ontology Multi-Virtual Machine and further interoperability for the chain.

At its launch, Ontology chose to forego the popular initial coin offering (ICO) model in favor of a series of community distributions and airdrops of its ONT cryptocurrency.

This helped to quickly establish both organic price discovery and a passionate community and helped the project to avoid subsequent regulatory scrutiny.

For example, for a brief period any person who signed up for the Ontology newsletter received an airdrop of free 1,000 ONT, which reached a value of $10 per token soon after the token became listed on major exchanges like Binance.

Ontology launched its own MainNet on June 30, 2018 and has been up and running smoothly since.

Ontology

Starting as an open-source project in 2017, IoTeX has built a decentralized platform whose aim is to empower the open economics for machines — an open ecosystem where people and machines can interact with guaranteed trust, free will, and under properly designed economic incentives.

With a global team of over 40 research scientists and engineers, IoTeX has built their EVM-compatible blockchain from scratch using the innovative Roll-DPoS consensus and launched in 2019 April, which has been running by 100+ delegates worldwide and has processed more than 10 million transactions already. On top of the IoTeX blockchain, the team has built the essential blocks of infrastructures to connect with Ethereum, BSC, and Heco blockchains such as ioPay wallet (https://iopay.me/) and ioTube bridge (https://iotube.org/), which serve ten thousands of users. IoTeX helps EVM-based DApps scale without concerning expensive gas fees!

Besides, middleware such as Decentralized Identity, Confidential Computing, and Secure Hardware has been built on top of the IoTeX blockchain. This has enabled the creation of self-sovereign devices such as Ucam, and real-world data oracles like Pebble. Ucam (https://ucam.iotex.io/) has been deployed to over 3000 households (http://iott.network/). Meanwhile, Pebble has been launched to more than 300 developers initially, and enables innovative Dapps to connect the physical world with the crypto world, such as real-world NFTs, weather derivatives and machine learning-as-mining.

IoTeX

Reef is a Reliable Extensible Efficient Fast Layer-1 Blockchain for DeFi, NFT & Gaming. Built using Substrate Framework, it provides high scalability, enabling almost instant low-cost transactions, and supports Solidity and EVM, allowing developers to seamlessly migrate their DApps from Ethereum without any change in the codebase.

Reef Chain is the most advanced EVM-compatible blockchain. It's self-upgradable and has on-chain governance. Its infrastructure also allows for EVM extensions which allows for native token bridge, scheduled calls (ie. recurring payments), and smart contract in-place code upgrades. In the near future, it will support additional VMs which will allow developers to write code in multiple programming languages. The network runs on a Nominated Proof-of-Stake (NPoS) consensus mechanism, which offers scalability and low fees.

REEF is the native token that is used for:

Fees for processing transactions and storing data.

Running validator nodes by staking REEF tokens.

Nominating which validator nodes should be part of the network.

Reef is backed by multiple leading funds and venture capitalists including NGC, QCP, Bitcoin.com, Kenetic Capital, LD Capital, TRG Capital, Krypital Group, Genesis Block, Woodstock Fund and others.

Reef Chain development tools include:

Remix and EVM integrated development environments for uploading and deploying smart contracts.

Reefscan blockchain explorer to assist with deploying validators, bonding and nominating validators, debugging contracts, and understanding network performance.

Reef command line tools that allow developers deploy applications from local environments.

Reef wallet for accessing and interacting with the blockchain

Reef

Qtum (pronounced ‘“quantum”)  is a proof-of-stake (PoS) smart contract open-source blockchain platform and value transfer protocol. It aims to bring together the strengths of Bitcoinand Ethereumin one chain. Qtum is built on Bitcoin's UTXO transaction model, with the added functionality of smart contract execution and DApps. Recently, the platform added support for DeFi applications. As of March 2021, there are more than 20 tokens created on the Qtum blockchain.

To learn more about this project, check out our deep dive of Qtum.

The project was announced in March 2016 and held an ICO a year after, in March 2017, which brought its founders $15 million USD. The Qtum main chain was released on Sept.13, 2017. Initially, the Qtum coin was issued as a ETH-20 token, but with the launch of the mainnet, it was converted to native blockchain.