2024: Swarm becomes feature complete
The past year has been a milestone one. The Swarm network achieved feature-completeness with several groundbreaking implementations. Erasure coding proved to be a game changer, ensuring data redundancy and resilience with the ability to reconstruct data even when portions are lost. The introduction of a fully decentralised price oracle has created a fair, transparent pricing system that autonomously balances supply and demand without central authority intervention.
Other significant achievements included the Access Control Trie (ACT) for enhanced privacy, doubled reserve size for improved node operator rewards, and GSOC opening possibilities for multi-user applications like forums and social media platforms.
Swarm in 2025: Bigger, faster, stronger
On the threshold of the coming year 2025, the newly appointed COO of the Swarm Foundation, Sándor A. Nagy, outlined an ambitious roadmap focussing on three key areas:
- User experience,
- Network enhancement
- Economic model strengthening
The Foundation aims to make Swarm more accessible through multi-chain support and an in-browser client—a potential game changer for adoption.
Key priorities for 2025 include:
- Improved upload and download speeds
- Blockchain data storage support
- Enhanced node operator rewards through improved bandwidth incentives
- Seamless availability of large datasets
- Tools for tracking and recording data provenance
- Decentralised decision-making through DAO implementation**
Tracking AI data and streaming on Swarm
While Swarm’s technology is groundbreaking, it only becomes meaningful with an active community who take it into the real world. In the final section of the event, the spotlight therefore turned towards some of the most outstanding ecosystem efforts.
Swarm Foundation has awarded two fellowships this year, to Datafund and Solar Punk.
Datafund is using its fellowship to develop a toolkit for data and model provenance in decentralised AI, addressing the growing need for transparency and trust in data origins and transformations. The goal is to develop a toolkit for developers to easily include provenance in their applications, with the data stored on Swarm.
Another fellowship, awarded to Solar Punk, has already delivered three crucial libraries supporting audio-video streaming, live streaming, and group chat functionality. These developments, showcased at both the Swarm Summit and Devcon, are already attracting partner interest for building new applications.