The decentralized storage platform Sia decided to make a hard fork in its Sia Coin (SC) blockchain in order to block the ASIC mining equipment of Bitmain and Innosilicon, and enable in its network only the ASIC miners of the Obelisk project. The news emerged yesterday, October 1st, on the company’s corporate blog. The announcement was made by David Vorick who explained that the decision to carry out this hard fork was made in consensus with the Sia Coin (SC) community.

In this way, Innosilicon’s monopoly on Sia Coin (SC) blockchain, which currently extracts 37.5% of SC hash rate through its miners, is being revoked in order to establish Obelisk as the sole ASIC miner for the platform, whose teams now have a secret integrated circuit, as a mechanism to mitigate the actions of possible attackers.

In this regard, Vorick expresses that the community is open to accept other manufacturers in the long term, as long as they contribute to the health of Sia Coin (SC) mining ecosystem and avoid abusive practices. He added that if there is another inadequate ASIC monopoly, the team is in a position to make another hard fork, or take any other action to defend the network.

Sia decentralized storage platform to make a hard fork in its Sia Coin (SC) blockchain to undermine ASIC miners of Bitmain and Innosilicon

“If we need to build another manufacturer in the short term, Obelisk has prepared a chip design that we can record and use to defend the network. In the long run, we hope there will be good manufacturers building ASICs with secret circuit extensions that we can take advantage of rather than explicitly resorting to Obelisk,” said David Vorick, Head Developer at Sia decentralized storage platform.

Vorick also pointed out that since there is no mechanism in Sia Coin (SC) blockchain to change the rules and force the update, the hard fork would be encouraged by launching a new code to promote the upgrade.

Thus, people will choose between rejecting the update, continuing to use the old SC block, or dividing the network into two separate chains. The hard fork, however, would have no impact on the functionality of Sia and Sia Coin (SC).