Day 1*
As the summer light symbolically vanquished the darkness on 21 June, Swarm network kicked off its three-day Swarm Virtual Summit. This year, the network's global community gathered in the virtual world, giving all its diverse members a chance to watch and listen to leading voices and keen enthusiasts across different fields on the online stage.
They shared their insights, fresh ideas, and experience relating to Swarm and Web3, creating an engaging event for everyone in the audience. Below is a recap of the first day, which includes the latest network updates, new partnerships and use cases for the network.
Swarm is ready to g(r)o(w)
The entire Swarm Virtual Summit is available here
The summit opened with the latest news in the Swarm network. In the last six months, Swarm has made impressive progress regarding the upgrade and optimisation of its basic infrastructure, along with recalibrated storage prices making running a node profitable, i.e. making the network economically sustainable:
- Enhanced syncing, multi-stamps per chunk, pinning
- Phases 3 and 4 finalisation, plus inclusion proofs
- Reduced freezing in redistribution game
- Reliable network, 0% error rate for data retrieval
“We have been through every stress test; we've already scaled up thousands of nodes in the network; we've had doublings; we've had everything and that 0% has been maintained,” Callum Toner from the Research Track stressed. And with better syncing, multiple stamps per chunk, pinning of files and more, Swarm provides a stable foundation for a plethora of future use cases, Callum added.
The new edition of the Book of Swarm is out
All that Swarm encompasses is also brought together in the revised and recently fully updated edition of the Book of Swarm, including the upgraded storage incentives mechanism. It details all the inner workings of the network, so if you have any technical questions, the Book of Swarm is the best source to go to.
Help make Swarm even better with SWIPs
Everyone interested in making the Swarm network even better and richer with features is invited to submit a formal proposal in the form of Swarm Improvement Proposals (SWIPs). Every sensible suggestion will be taken up by the research and development teams and put into action.
Impending roll out of the local store and decentralised price oracle
Regarding the near future, Callum pointed out the mainnet roll out of the updated localstore, which will be a breaking release, happening this week. The next big thing coming to Swarm in about five weeks is the decentralised price oracle (Phase 3), which will mark the completion of the core components of the storage incentives mechanism, along with the completion of Phase 4.
New partnerships
During the first day of the summit the Swarm Foundation also announced four new partnerships:
- DAppNode – A plug-n-play node provider for different blockchain networks.
- MiPasa – provides verified data for informed decision making. In his brief demo, Jonathan Levi showcased the browser-based app and its effortless integration with Swarm. It will allow researchers and analysts to pull verified models and data directly from Swarm, process and enrich it, and store them back to Swarm, all from their browsers.
- Kiwix – stores and provides internet content for people without internet access. Stephane Coillet-Matillon pointed out the problem of trust that AI will introduce and the need for establishing and verifying trust. In this kind of environment it is also important to have projects like Wikipedia on Swarm that people can trust and reference.
- CleanApp – a global coordination game for waste and hazard mapping. According to Boris Mamlyuk, blockchain is important in this effort because polluters work very hard to keep waste hotspots out of people’s perception and blockchain makes them permanent. CleanApp’s integration with Swarm will help put pollution evidence on a public storage solution where it will be free from tampering and censorship attempts.
Talks
Bringing Nextcloud to Swarm
In his talk, Björn Magalhães from MetaProvide discussed the possibilities of how 400,000 of already existing Nextcloud-servers could be used with Swarm for decentralised data-storage, blockchain interaction, and Bee node hosting. The demo focused on how you can connect your self-hosted Nextcloud instance to Swarm and leverage the potential of a decentralised storage network. Also, Nextcloud wallet-login is currently in the works that in the future could take advantage of Swarm’s native token, BZZ.
Creating digital hives - a Web3 builder’s toolkit
How create decentralised systems that are value-driven and where positive uses of the system are incentivised? Michal Matlon dissects the nine-part toolkit called The Hivemaker’s Code which is based on the three principles of how living organisms organise themselves: self-organisation (the system creates its own purpose), decentralisation (no subsystem can control other subsystems) and emergent creativity (the system must constantly adapt and create new solutions).
Enabling parallel societal structures through decentralised technologies
Joseph Jelacic takes the audience through the genesis of Paralelni Polis, one of Europe’s most prominent cryptoanarchic establishments, its philosophical foundations laid by Vaclav Benda and how they are involved in today’s crypto scene in Europe.
Bringing good data to Swarm
The last talk of the day was reserved for Črt Ahlin who presented the Great Data Upload initiative that aims to bring the world’s data to Swarm. Starting with public data, the goal is to preserve popular data, data that is costly to host and data that should be stored in a decentralised manner. Črt presented the tools that can be used to upload the data, the file format used, how to download the data and download limitations.