Siacoin soars after foundation vows to burn coins; BTC over $51k

Siacoin is surging after the new foundation for the decentralised file storage network announced it had plenty of funding for the next four years and would begin burning coins.

At 11.35am AEST, Siacoins were changing hands at US2.03c, up 25.6 per cent from yesterday and nearly a one-month high.

Siacoin — the back story

The No. 94 crypto, Sia is a peer-to-peer cloud storage network that is paid for via Siacoins. But six years after launch, it still hasn’t been able to win much adoption or the institutional attention received by competitor Filecoin, the No. 23 crypto.

To foster innovation, the community agreed to a hard fork in February that created a subsidy for the new Sia Foundation. It now has seven employees and is looking to hire more.

With US$1.77 million budgeted for funding in 2022, the foundation said overnight it was trying to see how many coins it could safely burn to ensure it wasn’t holding more than enough to fund a four-year runway.

Even tho the foundation would burn a bit less to play safe, I assume that then at least token burns will take place on a monthly or quarterly basis.

However, a big token burn would be a very strong sign for the community who is (partly) desperately waiting for it.

— R2D2 Bullgirl (@r2d2One) October 5, 2021

(For those new to crypto – token-burns are a way to take an amount of cryptocurrency out of circulation, by sending them to an inaccessible address. They’re generally seen as bullish events for token prices, although it doesn’t always work out that way).

Yesterday’s Facebook outage may have also drawn attention to the virtue of decentralised networks. Filecoin was flat this morning but smaller competitors Storj and MaidSafeCoin had both gained around nine per cent.

siacoin will blow up soon 🚀🚀. After seeing what happend to facebook yesterday, a whole ecosystem taken down. The need for web3 is more relevant now than ever. Big and small companies will see the need for siacoin. Too the moon guys 🚀🚀🚀#bitcoin #btc #shiba #siacoin #doge

— envelope (@willngu82379720) October 5, 2021

Crypto market at US$2.22 trillion

Overall at lunchtime (Sydney time) the crypto market was up 2.4 per cent to US$2.24 trillion, its highest level since the pullback on September 8, the day of El Salvador’s “Bitcoin law” took effect.

Siacoin wasn’t the only gainer — Bitcoin was trading at US$51,049, up 3.4 per cent from yesterday, while Ethereum was changing hands at US$3,490, up 2.5 per cent.

Shiba Inu had been the best-performing crypto in the top 100, gaining another 42.2 per cent to US0.001817 after “eating a zero” yesterday.

The meme coin is now up 155 per cent in the past week, outperforming even Axie Infinity, which is up 77 per cent in that time.

Siacoin was the second-best gainer, followed by Theta Network, which was up10.6 per cent to US$6.76.

On the flip side, OMG Network was the biggest loser, falling 12.4 per cent to US$14.69.

Several smaller coins had hit all-time highs, including Steem fork Hive, a decentralised social network that may also be gaining on the Facebook outage; UFO Gaming; and two boundary-pushing DeFi projects by developer Daniele Sesta, Time, Spell and Ice.