Siacoin (SC) is among many altcoins experiencing a notable price increase on Wednesday, gaining 29% in the past 24 hours.

On Wednesday, the price of Siacoin rose to $0.005248 from its low of $0.004103, extending gains seen since the altcoin touched $0.003531 on July 5. Wednesday’s upside sees SC rank as one of the top performers in the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap.

SC has seen its market cap surge by 27% to over $303 million. Meanwhile, 24-hour trading volume has skyrocketed more than 2,700% to over $72.7 million.

Other coins to register double-digit gains in 24 hours at the time of writing were the meme coin Mog Coin (MOG) with 15% and Bitcoin Layer-2 network Stacks (STX) with 13%. Optimism (OP) and Ondo (ONDO) were also up 8% and 7% respectively.

Siacoin is the native token of Sia, a decentralized cloud storage network that offers a marketplace where tap into their unused storage space.

On Sia, one can rent out their storage, with those who lease entering into smart contract agreement to pay hosts via the native utility token. Hosts on the other hand, use SC as collateral to guarantee reliability and trust. SC therefore plays a crucial role in not just helping secure the proof-of-work (PoW) coin but also as the payments currency on the network. Notably, the PoW mechanism allows for 30,000 SC as block reward.

The project launched officially in June 2015, and saw the price of SC rise to the all-time high of $0.09287 in January 2018.

Sia Foundation provides grants update

On July 9, the Sia Foundation published an update indicating availability of grant funding for community contributors. Applicants get funded to research, develop and deploy projects and tools that support decentralized cloud storage and broader Sia ecosystem.

In its latest report, the grants committee said it approved new grants for four projects: S5 Network, SkyMusic 2, SiaLearn, and Sia NFS Gateway.