Siacoin

The Sia test platform went live in early 2015. That was shortly followed by the creation of the first siacoin block – also known as the genesis block. A block reward of 300,000 new SC was given to the Sia developers who mined it. A block reward is the number of newly created, free coins given to successful miners for creating new blocks.

A tapered issuance system was coded into the Sia protocol by the project’s developers where each new block mined produced 1 less siacoin as a block reward, until block number 270,000 was reached. After that, siacoin blocks rewards became fixed at 30,000 SC per block.

The total supply of siacoin is unbounded, meaning there is no hard limit on how many siacoins can be in circulation. That protocol was established to allow the Sia platform to scale to millions of users and ensure it could always be used.

To help keep the supply in check, Siacoin’s developers introduced a token burn feature – a mechanism for permanently removing tokens from circulation. According to the official website, “sellers of storage on the network will burn coins to prove that they are real and have good intentions towards the network.” In other words, hosts who remove more of their own coins from existence are presumed to be more trustworthy.

In January 2018, the price of SC hit its all-time high of $0.093 but dropped over the rest of that year. By November 2018, Siacoin had fallen under the $0.005 level and remained beneath the price point for more than two years until it returned above it. In April 2021, SC’s price rose to $0.063 – its highest level in more than three years.