Swarm Community Call, 26 October

The network is witnessing explosive growth

After releasing 1.17.5 Bee version in mid-October, bringing some minor but important changes, the Bee team is now working on providing more such improvements with the next update. The team is also focusing on addressing the connectivity issue on the mainnet that predominantly nodes joining from the People’s Republic of China are experiencing. Swarm network is undergoing exponential growth, currently accounting for well over 16k active nodes, which is a 4.01x monthly increase, allowing for excellent levels of data replication, further decentralisation and robustness of the network in general.

Core research milestones to be soon delivered all at once

Meanwhile, the focal point of the research team’s efforts is channelled towards rigorous testing of the Price Oracle and meeting major milestones in the following weeks. After increasing the internal testnet and thus improving on the accuracy of price data, the team is confident in moving the testing to the public testnet next week, expecting to see great behaviour there as well and progressing apace to soon reaching several massive research milestones all at once. “We have everything right where we want it to be,” said Callum Toner, praising also the community which has proved to be instrumental by providing valuable feedback and aiding the research team in identifying and addressing potential hurdles.

What remains after concluding Phases 3 and 4 are erasure codes; development in that area is already under way.
Last but not least, the long anticipated and needed move to the Sepolia testnet will be happening this week, while additional testing environments will also be kept and maintained to provide a better testing process overall.

Breathing life into NFTs with Swarm feeds

Despite the cooled frenzy over NFTs in the last couple of years, innovation has not followed the same path. The guest speaker Ramesh Pallikara shed light on the slowly evolving trend towards dynamic NFTs.

Swarm's value proposition is the autonomy it offers when determining at the level at which an NFT could be dynamic—be it at the base token URI, within the contract, at the metadata, or image on the resource URI level. Swarm feeds empower developers to keep these resources modifiable and updatable, Ramesh elucidated.

This opens a whole new path for intriguing use cases; for instance, keeping a WordPress article published as an NFT with integrated monetisation, where the longevity of an article's life is fuelled by direct fund transfers to its wallet. These innovative ideas are laying the groundwork for an exciting journey ahead.

As an experiment, a collection of one thousand NFTs was minted to be distributed among the Swarm community. Instead of relying on gateways or external URLs, the NFT images are served from the local Bee node or the Swarm Desktop App. All NFT holders will see the same image served from the same Swarm feed hash, which gives the opportunity to “forecast” any kind of picture or message through this feed to all the holders of the NFT. Hence, the ForecasterBee – what does your bee see?

Swarm Community Call attendees will be able to claim the NFT at the next Call (30 November).

Community talk: VideoWiki

The call’s finale was dedicated to VideoWiki, a Swarm Foundation grantee that provides a versatile event-hosting platform. In VideoWiki users can host their events via so-called Rooms or Video Cast, featuring a collaborative whiteboard, shared notes, external video sharing, presentation uploads, and session recording, as well as allowing for public or private casts (in Video Cast). They also offer streaming options to platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, or Twitch.

Post-session, recordings can be stored in either local or cloud storage, including Swarm’s decentralised storage. For connecting to Swarm, VideoWiki uses an extension that runs on top of FairOS, a decentralised operating system. It also uses FairOS as a basis for the creation of user accounts and pods. When the recording is stored in either of the available options, it is ready for editing with features like trimming, speeding up, subtitle addition, and sound enhancements.

Become part of the Swarm, run a full node on Dappnode

For those ready to take the plunge into the world of decentralisation, you can now easily run your Swarm node on Dappnode. From 1 November on, every Dappnode shipped will also come with a flyer that will give buyers enough BZZ to stake and run a full Bee node, enabling them to actively contribute to and benefit from the network, both through providing vital storage resources and participating in Swarm’s reward redistribution game. More information and a chance to win some prizes will be given during our upcoming Twitter/X Spaces AMA happening soon.

Swarm Community Call, 26 October – Recap