Dropbox and Google Drive have become the household names of online data storage. Can Sia, a blockchain alternative, and its Siacoin cryptocurrency catch up with these centralised services?
Sia acts as a secure marketplace for cloud storage, in which users can lease their unused space. The blockchain uses smart contracts to organise agreements between owners and renters. It also has a native cryptocurrency, Siacoin (SC), which is used for payments.
In a technology-driven society that increasingly uses more data, there could well be demand for a decentralised alternative to data storage. Siacoin is hoping to tap into that demand as it gears up to release the next major update to its blockchain.
SC has recently started to rally after proving vulnerable to the wider crypto crash. With the coin up 10% in a recent seven-day period, many forecasters have given hopeful outlooks
What's the Siacoin price prediction? How high can Siacoin go? Let's see.
From the Siacoin whitepaper
The whitepaper states: “Sia is a decentralised cloud storage platform that intends to compete with existing storage solutions, at both the P2P and enterprise-level.
“Instead of renting storage from a centralised provider, peers on Sia rent storage from each other. Sia itself stores only the storage contracts formed between parties, defining the terms of their arrangement. A blockchain, similar to Bitcoin, is used for this purpose.
“By forming a contract, a storage provider (also known as a host) agrees to store a client’s data, and to periodically submit proof of their continued storage until the contract expires. The host is compensated for every proof they submit, and penalised for missing a proof. Since these proofs are publicly verifiable (and are publicly available in the blockchain), network consensus can be used to automatically enforce storage contracts. Importantly, this means that clients do not need to personally verify storage proofs; they can simply upload their file and let the network do the rest.”
Siacoin’s price history
Siacoin was launched at $0.00004 in August 2015 and for the first two years it did not see much price action. The coin saw its first spike in the summer of 2017 as Sia released an update titled ‘Capricorn’.
This update, version 1.3 on the Sia blockchain, made data restoration much easier. If a host goes offline or loses the data stored on it, the Sia system selects a new host and can restore files using encrypted chunks of the data. This new update means renters no longer need to keep back-up copies of their data.
Sia also revealed in a blog post that the hardware designed for mining Siacoin had brought $4m revenue in advance sales. Obelisk, a subsidiary of Sia’s parent company Nebulous, was designed specifically for mining Siacoin. The post also stated the profits would fund Sia’s growth and development.
Siacoin saw a price increase during that period, climbing from $0.001 on 30 April 2017 to a peak of $0.019 on 22 June. Afterwards, Siacoin dropped in value to below $0.01 in July, before falling further in September to around the $0.004 mark – although this was still 100 times its launch price.
The utility token stayed around that price until December, when it started a bullish trend. Siacoin’s price on 1 December 2017 was at $0.006, and had climbed to $0.03 by the end of the month. The price continued to be bullish and reached its all-time high of $0.11 on 6 January 2018.
January 2018 saw Sia launch a new brand and website, focusing on the key message that the blockchain was the most affordable and most secure of any alternative. The blog post said: “This new site does a much better job of explaining our mission and goals and getting our users information they’ll need to succeed with our product.”
Despite this, Siacoin fell back to $0.03 as January 2018 ended and dropped to $0.02 in February despite the company announcing that it was raising funds.
The utility token saw another peak in April that year, when Sia announced the results of funds it had raised from tokenised securities offerings. The funds closed at the end of April with 231 being sold, raising $1.5m. The price of Siacoin increased from $0.01 on 1 April 2018 to $0.02 by the end of the month. Afterwards, the price fell back, continuing to drop until the end of the year, after which there was little action for the following two years.
In December 2018, the official Sia app was released for Ledger Nano S, a crypto hardware wallet. According to the Sia blog post announcing the news, it became the safest place to store Siacoin, but failed to stir a rally.
It was only at the beginning of 2021 that the price started climbing once more. In the first few months of the year, the Sia blockchain successfully completed a hard fork. Non-Obelisk mining hardware was being used to gain crypto rewards from Sia, reducing the value of the Nebulous subsidiary’s hardware. One reason for the hard fork was to change the algorithm to disable non-Obelisk miners. This was achieved, and the Siacoin price reached $0.01 on 9 February 2021.
Another reason for the hard fork was to separate Sia from its parent company, which was initially called Nebulous but completed a rebrand in April 2021 to take on the name Skynet. Sia Foundation is now a non-profit entity that runs independently from Skynet. The foundation is funded through transaction fees.
The parent company has taken a different direction with Skynet, including a second layer protocol for Sia. The protocol is building a peer-to-peer internet alternative that does not require a centralised organisation to keep applications online.
After the rebrand was completed, the price peaked, closing at $0.05 on 17 April 2021. It slumped before partially recovering on a somewhat bearish trend in mid-to-late November, with a closing price of just under $0.026 on 29 November 2021. It then dropped again slightly, peaking at over $0.024 in intraday trading on 2 December 2021.
The coin continued on a general downtrend, dropping to $0.008 on 24 January 2022, a new seven-month low.
However, since then the coin has enjoyed a minor rally. Sia released a new tool called Embarcadero that enables users to swap easily between Siacoin and its other native token, Siafund, which is used to share network revenue. It wrote in a blog post: “You can now safely trade between Sia’s native currencies with any willing counterparty, using a clean, user-friendly UI, and without ever putting your funds at risk.”
Sia has also said that the UI provides a glimpse into what to expect for the next version of its software. The post concluded: “This marks the first release of Sia software developed entirely in-house at the Foundation, and we’re excited to share it with the community.”
The cryptocurrency has subsequently surpassed a major barrier as it reached $0.01. But the data-driven Siacoin has been showing signs of weakness.
Despite a new user interface update to its dashboard, the cryptocurrency has since plummeted. At the time of writing, it has fallen dramatically to $0.003. However, when looking at the short-term, SC is beginning to rise, and is up 10% in a recent seven-day period.
Siacoin price prediction
The long-term forecaster consensus is fairly optimistic about the utility token, with its value expected to increase gradually over the next five years. CoinQuora’s long-term prediction for 2025 is a high of $0.80.
WalletInvestor claims Siacoin is an “awesome long-term investment”. Its Siacoin price prediction for 2022 sees SC breaking the $0.008 mark in a year, while it predicts that SC will reach $0.02 in five years' time.
DigitalCoinPrice suggests the coin will be worth an average of $0.005 in 2022. Its Siacoin price prediction for 2025 is $0.007, while it forecasts an average SC price of $0.01 for 2030.
Gov.capital has an SC coin price prediction of $0.013 in a year’s time and $0.08 in five years’ time.
Finally, the Siacoin price prediction for 2030 from PricePrediction.net says the coin will hold firm and race from $0.006 in 2022 to a maximum price of $0.12 by the next decade.
Is Siacoin a good investment?
It might be. Although 2019 and 2020 were fairly uneventful for the token’s price, Siacoin was on a bullish trend in 2021.
Remember, however, that prices can also go down – as shown by Siacoin’s vulnerability to the recent crypto crash. Never invest more money than you can afford to lose.
Can Siacoin reach $1? How high can Siacoin go?
It could, although the consensus from price prediction sites says that the price will not surpass the $0.10 mark in the next five years.
Remember, though, that price prediction sites are by no means always correct, and you should always do your own research before investing.
Hope this article can provide you with a better understanding about Siacoin price prediction.
