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Welcome to Skynet Guide!#

Skynet Guide is a community maintained knowledge base to help you on your journey through the decentralized world of Sia and Skynet.

Sia is a layer 1 solution, decentralized storage. Anyone can become a renter (pays for storage) or a host (earns money by providing storage). Skynet builds on top of it and uses Sia as its backbone for layer 2 solution that can be best described as decentralized internet.

The fact you are reading this right now means you are interested in Sia and Skynet, aware of at least one of these, and want to learn more because:

  • You like Sia, want to "invest" into SC and want to store your coins securely. In order to do that, check out How does Sia and Skynet work section and its guides, specifically Trading and Wallets.
  • You have unused storage on your drives, or are planning to buy some big drives and start providing that storage to others for money. Then continue to Hosting - Get paid for your storage section.
  • You want to use decentralized storage for private data backups and want to manage everything by yourself. In that case, you want to use Sia directly and check out Renting - Using Sia for Private Backups section.
  • You want to use decentralized storage for both public and private data backups, but not being limited to that. You also want to share files and benefit from everything that decentralized internet can offer to you. In that case, you are looking for Sia's extension called Skynet and its rapidly growing amount of content/apps where everything can interact and all your data are your own. Did you ever regret spending years to build your community and content on centralized platforms only to never be able to leave it and take everything with yourself. On Skynet, every piece of data belongs to the user and if some developers makes a better app, you can switch in a second. If this sounds good, see it for yourself how deep this rabbit hole goes and Explore the Skynet, Decentralized Internet.
  • Or you are a developer who want to expand the ecosystem and build awesome stuff. Then Develop with Skynet is the section you're looking for.

This site is community-managed which means that anyone can contribute to it through our GitHub. It has been created by several members of Sia Community to help newcomers but also seasoned users find answers to any questions they might have. Each article goes through reviews by our Contributors and represents our shared views and knowledge. It is our aim to provide all possible resources in order for you to make educated decision when it comes to using Sia and Skynet.

Version of this site you are seeing now is third iteration as it went through complete content update and refactoring in late October 2021. Since Skynet Guide uses automatic deployment to Skynet whenever a change is made, you can always access it no matter what either in centralized way at skynet.guide or fully decentralized way via HNS domain and Skynet Portal at sky-guide.hns.siasky.net.