Swarm Foundation promotes the development and maintenance of the Swarm network.

It has been three long years since our last gathering in the vibrant city of Madrid, where ideas sparked, connections were made, and the Swarm community came together.

The Swarm network was abuzz with activity in May and there’s a lot of ground to cover, so let’s dive right in. The Bee Track has released versions 1.15.0 and 1.16.0, introducing new features and several improvements. In version 1.15.0, a new pushsync feature has been introduced to improve chunk syncing and replication during uploading. Other enhancements include improved blocklist display, storage radius adjustment, chainstate total amount, and peer mode added to the status protocol, and reduced workload during initial historical syncing.

The May Swarm Community Call was inspiring and full of optimism: the Swarm network has been demonstrating remarkable performance for almost two weeks, maintaining a 0% error rate on uploads and downloads.

Over the last several months the Bee dev team has been hard at work with the rollout of the storage incentives system which will ensure that node operators who share their disk space with the network will get rewarded. Along the way the dev team has been continually testing various aspects of the health of the network and monitoring community feedback in order to diagnose any issues. One issue which has come up is that of node performance. Some node operators may be missing out on earning storage incentives due to insufficient hardware performance. To address this issue, we’ve put together this guide for benchmarking node performance so node operators can make sure that their nodes are running optimally.

The April Swarm Community Call was focused on tools that provide a more numbers-based look at the Swarm network, and on easy publishing of unstoppable content on Swarm.

In April, the Bee Track laid out the blueprint for the upcoming releases of the Bee client to fix the issues uncovered in their investigation. The localstore rewrite project is in its final phase before testing, which is expected to begin in the coming weeks. The Bee Track team are also working on the requirements that nodes must meet in order to participate in the storage incentives game.

Running a Bee node is essential for building decentralised applications on the Swarm network. However, as a developer, it is often convenient to work in an environment where interactions with the node/network can be tested rapidly and without putting the node’s storage data or the user’s tokens at risk.

Bee client is now version 1.13.0 and is bringing breaking changes. This includes the upgrade of the go-libp2p, which uses a new format for the p2p keys. The update will exclude nodes from storage incentives unless they have enough balance to cover at least five storage-incentives-related transactions.

The Swarm Community Call began with a round of updates.

TL;DR: This guide will walk you through the process of publishing a website on Swarm using the Swarm Desktop App. You’ll learn how to install the app, fund your account, upload your website, and connect an ENS domain for a user-friendly experience. By following these steps, you’ll be able to host a censorship-resistant website on decentralised storage and make it easily accessible for users.

Following years of incubation, the Fair Data Society initiative graduated and moved onto an independent path. With this, Swarm Foundation has pledged 2 million BZZ in the coming 10 years, to champion support for layer 2 projects that empower digital freedom, privacy, and interoperability. The pledge was officially announced at the Fair Data Society graduation event, ‘New Day’ on March 21st 2023.

February was a big month for the Swarm network. The price of postage stamps has been recalibrated with the release of Bee 1.12.0, which marks a major milestone for Swarm's self-sustaining network. The Research Track has also completed the documentation for Phase 4, which details the work of this phase of the Storage incentives roadmap.

The main topic of the February Swarm Community Call was the postage stamp price calibration, which took place on 22 February. The recalibration increased the price of storage by 6000x

This upgrade is a significant milestone in the development of the Swarm network, as it enables Swarm node operators to earn rewards in exchange for contributing their storage resources to the network.

In January, the Bee Track released a new version of the Bee client (1.11) that brings an important update to uploads with mutable batches. This update causes newer chunks in a batch to replace older ones on the network. The Research Track, on the other hand, is nearing completion of Phase 3 of the storage incentives and is making great progress in producing documentation for Phases 4 and 5.

December was a big month for releases. Bee 1.10 was released on the mainnet and with it Storage Incentives Phase 2. The latter allows node operators to participate in the redistribution of storage fees. Over the next few weeks, the research team will be watching closely to see how the new mechanism performs as it brings Phase 3 closer to release.

The Swarm Foundation announced exciting updates at its recent semi-annual solstice event. Phase 2 of its ambitious network upgrade is now live on mainnet, allowing Swarm’s storage node operators to be compensated for their contributions.

On 21 December, let’s venture forth together and explore the universe of possibilities enabled by Swarm and its emerging ecosystem.

The October Monthly Ecosystem Call focused on the storage incentives upgrade (the progress so far) and Swarm network’s ecosystem.

The Bee Track team have been busy throughout November, continuously improving the deployment and testing process to improve its efficiency. They have recently cleaned out and fixed issues on their testnet and are now working on having new testnets — beta, public, and internal.

End of the month is here, and as is now the habit, last Thursday was reserved for the Monthly Ecosystem Call

An economically self-sustaining mechanism to gather storage operators.

The upgrade of the Swarm network storage incentives, which began on 13 September, is now in full swing. Both, Phase 2 and 3 of the upgrade, are currently undergoing extensive testing: Phase 2 on the public testnet and Phase 3 on a closed testnet.

The development of the Swarm network and its associated ecosystem continues to move forward as planned. Bee client 1.9.0 is out and the team behind Bee is fully focused on meeting the timelines for bringing storage incentives to mainnet (they are already available for preview on testnet). There’s also a new Bee-js in the pipeline, which brings an array of breaking changes.

Hosting the Devcon archive on the Swarm network is part of Swarm network’s mission to make Web3 more decentralised and censorship-resistant while empowering digital freedom.

In this informative workshop recorded during Devcon VI, Bee product lead Attila Gazsó takes the audience through the process of setting up light and full Bee node.

NOTE: This blog post is geared towards running a bee full node. If you are wanting ONLY TO ACCESS / UPLOAD unstoppable content from/to Swarm, checkout Swarm Desktop.

The September Monthly Ecosystem Call was dedicated to storage incentives — their upgrade roadmap, specific launch dates and their different features, such as the price oracle.

September has seen a lot of action across all tracks. The Bee track released a breaking version of the Bee client (1.8.0) and two additional releases with a patch and an update. Because of the new Bee client version, the JS Track also had to update Swarm Desktop to make it compatible with the changes.

On 13 September 2022, the Swarm Foundation began the most substantial upgrade to the Swarm network since its mainnet release. The upgrade will unfold in several phases and enable node operators to receive rewards for their services to the network.

On 14 September 2022 the Swarm Foundation hosted a meetup titled “Storage incentives: The missing piece to make blockchains complete”. The event took place during EthBerlin at the famous c-bas

his release will activate the first phase of the upgraded storage incentives. It is the first step that will later open the doors to rewarding node operators for providing storage to the network.

In August, the spotlight was on the upcoming storage incentives rollout. The Bee and JS Track have been working closely with the Research Track to get everything ready for the rollout. This includes updating the Bee client and the Swarm Desktop (Beta) dApp.

On 28 July 2022, the Swarm network Discord hosted the main Swarm network community event, the Monthly Ecosystem Call. The first to take the microphone was Bee Product Lead, Attila Gaszo.

This tutorial will explain how to bridge MakerDAO DAI from Ethereum Mainnet to Gnosis Chain, using the Gnosis Chain bridge.

The Swarm Foundation’s JS Track released Swarm Desktop (Beta), its biggest software release since the mainnet launch. Swarm Desktop enables one-click setup of a Swarm network node, simple interaction with the network without crypto onboarding and introduces two additional modes of operation — ultra light and light mode. It’s available for download here for Windows, MacOS and Linux.

Everything is ready for the Onwards, Swarm! event on 21 June 2022. Tune in to the YouTube livestream at 16:00 CET for the latest updates on the Swarm network.

Join us on the summer solstice, 21 June 2022 at 16:00 CET and share the excitement as we gather to announce a special release

May has been a truly exciting month for different tracks that keep the Swarm network going. The BeeJS Track released a new Bee Dashboard version, along with several Bee-js releases.

Swarm Foundation is proud to announce that the Bee mainnet soft launch will happen on 13 June 2021. And immediately following it, the BZZ public token sale is scheduled to happen on 14 June 2021 via CoinList.

This latest release is an accumulation of a lot of work done in the last couple of months by the team. We’ve improved and refactored substantial amount of components and areas of the codebase as well as fixed a few critical bugs

Based on this, in Q1 of 2022, efforts were dedicated to creating a fluid and easy user experience when setting up a Bee node on the majority of operating systems.

April was the month of spring cleaning for different tracks around Swarm. The Bee client saw a patch release to fix some critical issues, while the BeeJS team also cleared up some minor bugs with the new Bee-js release. On the ecosystem side, the Swarm community near and far got treated to a Monthly Ecosystem Call.

The Bee team is happy to announce the latest release v1.5 This release comes with significant changes to how the Bee nodes store data locally.

March was marked by the WAM hackathon, organised by Fair Data Society in partnership with Swarm. Three weeks of talks, demos and presentations connected artists, gamers, developers and activists in an effort to build a better Web. Important partnerships were forged, like the one between Kiwix and Swarm that will see the whole of Wikipedia uploaded to Swarm’s decentralised storage.

The text below is a recap of Viktor Tron’s talk from the We Are Millions Hackathon (WAM) and Festival. You can listen to the entire talk here.

Answers to your questions about Bee airdrop

There’s no rest for the wicked and February has kept the Swarm team busy as always. A new Bee client release saw the light of day, as have three new releases from the BeeJS team. But the main focus of the entire Swarm team is to realise Milestone 2 of the technical roadmap, announced last December, in sync with the specified timeline.

On Friday, 18 February 2022, Angela Vitzthum, the Product Owner for Fairdrive, took the Wave stage at ETH Denver to introduce the audience to Swarm and more specifically to Fairdrive.

As the pace of technological evolution quickens and intensifies, it also exerts an increasing influence on all spheres of life, including art.

Swarm is about to take a giant step closer to the mainnet release by deploying a new release of Swarm. The upcoming release (estimated Tuesday, 9 February, 09:00 CET) includes, among others, an integration with Bzzaar (on Goerli).

With 2021 behind us, the Swarm team entered the new year at the usual pace, working hard to make Swarm features complete by the end of the year.

The text below is a recap from Rinke Hendriksen’s EthCC [4] talk “Hello World, Swarm” from July 2021. In it, he gives a concise but complete introduction to the inner workings of the Bee nodes that make up the Swarm network.

The idea of the world computer was born out of Ethereum’s founding fathers’ vision for a new and better Web. In it, Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood and Jeffery Wilcke envisioned a serverless Web, free of large corporations and one which could be economically self-sustaining through blockchain technology.

The Gather, Swarm! event is now behind us. It was the first-ever for the team behind Swarm to meet with the community in the metaverse and to present what they have up their sleeves for the following year.

Swarm works the way it does because it is formed of many independent nodes that collaborate to store and deliver your data. But why do these nodes collaborate and can’t the system be abused? Understanding Swarm’s bandwidth incentives is key to answering these questions.

The airdrop is coming to an end. And what a ride it has been. Since the announcement of the airdrop, the Swarm network has grown from 200 Bee nodes to hundreds of thousands of Bees all over the globe.

The Gather, Swarm! event is only a few days away. The Swarm team will be moving beyond the boundaries of the usual Zoom calls, taking the gathering into the virtual world. Exploration, Easter eggs, interactivity and more await you!

Swarm Foundation is proud to share its tech team’s internal agenda for the next 12 months. The aim is to create predictability in the development tracks and the wider organisation as well as help coordinate between the Foundation’s efforts and the efforts deployed to the broader Swarm community.

The Swarm Bee team is excited to announce that an initial version of the Restricted API feature is available and ready for experimentation!

The Swarm ecosystem is young, and there is always space for a lot of cool utilities, apps, and use cases. We support developing on Swarm with a set of libraries, CLIs, and utilities. I will demonstrate how to utilize some of these components with a small hacking session.

The Swarm Bee Team is proud to announce the release of Bee v1.4.0. It includes a major change to the protocol behaviour that will improve network resilience significantly. You must update your nodes to this latest version or they will no longer be part of the network.

A lot has happened since the last update. The Bee team implemented important changes to the network: check out the Bee 1.3.0 release.

The Bee team has been working hard on measuring and identifying key problems in the swarm DHT these last few months.

Two weeks after the 1.2.0 release, Swarm Foundation is releasing a new version of Bee. The most important thing to know is that Bee will now block peers that don’t agree on the same block hash of a certain block height.

A comprehensive description of the insights of the single faucet of BZZ Token, explained in detail.

Today, Swarm Foundation is releasing a new version of Bee, the Swarm network client. It is being tested by the growing testergroup that can be found on Discord. Among the updates, the recommendations of the Cure53 audit were implemented.

By Elad, Swarm Foundation Dev Team Lead It’s been an exciting couple of months for the Bee team since the much anticipated 1.0 release.

In August, a new mainnet release happened, fixing bugs from the initial Swarm 1.0 release, and improving the performance and stability of the network. Some new features were added too. Make sure to update your nodes and check the release notes.

The first class of the Swarm Summer School has graduated. In the past week, speakers from all sides of project development have been conducting talks and workshops. Swarm Association congratulates every participant for investing their time in sharing their knowledge.

On 21 June 2021, Swarm released its first mainnet client. Today, Swarm is releasing a new version 1.1.0, fixing bugs and adding four new features.

As you probably know, the Swarm Summer School is happening next week, starting on Monday 23 August 2021. This blog post will present the programme and schedule for the week, to illustrate the dynamics and what to expect.

The Swarm Association is organising a series of lectures and workshops called the Swarm Summer School. Sign up and don’t miss your chance to learn directly from the team.

July was paved with learning for the Swarm team. The Swarm 1.0 release was deployed to the mainnet for the first time and close observation on performance, bugs, and stability issues was needed to make sure everything is working as it should.

Running the Swarm Desktop App (Beta) in light mode lets you upload files, folders or websites to the Swarm network. To do that you first need to buy postage stamps.

Swarm Foundation is happy to announce the next stage of the Airdrop: the selection of trusted nodes.

Last month was an amazing one for the Swarm team and the Swarm Foundation. Two very important milestones were achieved, and it’s fair to say they marked the beginning of a new era of Swarm.

Last month, Swarm released Bee 1.0, and finalised its token sale. During this incredibly busy week, other projects and tools were released. In this article, you will find an overview of the tools and projects the Bee-JS team has published.

With the launch of its mainnet, Swarm has reached what is probably the most important milestone in its existence. The Ethereum mainnet, however, is very expensive for the sort of transactions Swarm Bee generates. So Swarm has opted to use xDAI as a scaling solution.

Go to the official Swarm Desktop webpage and download the installer. Run it and wait for the process to finish. Everything should be automatic and the node should set up by itself. A successful installation is indicated by the green status icon in the bottom left-hand side corner.

The Swarm Foundation unveiled the beta version of the Swarm Desktop App (Beta). Its goal is to take the best from Web2 and replace the complex experience of Web3 with a familiar one. The app is intended for the tech enthusiasts who want to try something different and for those who are just entering the crypto space.

It’s official! The Swarm team is proud to announce that the Swarm mainnet has launched. Bee 1.0 has been released and is running on mainnet. This means everybody can now join in creating the Swarm mainnet network. This is a historical moment in the history of Swarm.

Today, the Swarm team is releasing Bee v1.0-rc4. Node operators who have been running testnet nodes can now update to this new version. Take this opportunity to participate in the final days of the airdrop campaign.

Swarm Foundation is proud to announce that Swarm 1.0 is live on mainnet. This special release will be celebrated with an online event, Swarm One, where the developer teams will explain everything users need to know about the first mainnet release and what to expect in the future.

The last month has been very busy for the Swarm dev team. The Swarm v0.6 release has had exciting new features added. Some crucial changes have been made and Bee node operators need to update their nodes.

The long-awaited Bee v0.6 release is here. With it, some really important changes have been made. Bee node operators must update their nodes if they want to stay part of the network and be able to continue to participate in the airdrop.

April was a heads-down / work-hard month for the Swarm team. A lot of things have been going on in the background. We’re proud to share our progress.

The Bee Dashboard is a web app that can help you set up your Bee node. It connects to your locally running node, checks the status of different API endpoints and offers troubleshooting.

Bee v0.5.3 has been spinning for a while now, but our dev team have not been idling. In the background, we have been working on the v0.6.0 release, which is almost ready for a test drive.

March was as busy as always. The team was focusing on bug fixes and performance enhancements. A new version of the bee-js was released and a new Swarm release is around the corner, too.

Over the past few weeks, in an effort to improve the user experience and resource usage of Bee, we’ve been looking into various issues that have been reported by the community.

Only one month after we announced the 1 million BZZ tokens airdrop, the Swarm network has grown immensely.

February has been a remarkable month for the Swarm and the Fair Data Society team. Apart from the regular work on the Swarm code, which produced a new release of Swarm (v0.5.1), the two teams joined forces and managed to pull off a really interesting hackathon event.

Only one month after our alpha release, we are happy to announce the beta release of Bee-js. It’s a Javascript library which exposes the Bee functionalities and makes it easy to use in web projects.

As we head towards the Swarm 1.0 release, we are working hard on expanding the network as much as possible. We are happy to see that the number of active Bee nodes is bigger day by day and the reality of a truly decentralized world computer is closer than ever.

We invite you to join our discussions and become an active member of our wonderful community.

If you attended the Liberate Data hackathon last week, then you’ll know we had an amazing time. We were truly humbled by the participation and the support shown

Yes, you read it right. Swarm is giving out 1 million BZZ tokens to the people who already run a Bee node on the testnet. We call this airdrop “The Rise of Bee”.

The beginning of 2021 was busy as always. After a short New Years’ Eve break, the team dived right back into work and we are happy to share two new releases — the new release of Swarm Bee and the Alpha release of the bee-js libraries.

Swarm Association is pleased to announce the successful completion of its private fundraiser that ended with the recent Swarm Live release, raising USD 6 million.

As you probably know, the JavaScript team is one of the latest additions to the Ethereum Swarm organization. The team has been working relentlessly and here are the first fruits of their work.

Make sure you don’t miss the Liberate Data Week, a Fair Data Society organized event, that will run from 8–14 February 2021.

As 2020 is becoming a thing of the past, it is time to evaluate what Swarm achieved throughout the year and share its plans for this year.

If you attended the Swarm Live release online event, you probably know that all the research in recent months has paid massive dividends. We have made significant improvements and now have a very good idea of how the Swarm incentives will work.

December is the closing month of the year and most of the teams took time to reflect on the work that was done throughout the year. We are happy to conclude that the year was fruitful for Swarm. Many important milestones were met and a lot of progress was made.

2020 is over and Swarm is continuing with the strong pace that was set last year. The team is working relentlessly towards Swarm 1.0, which is set for release in Q2 this year, but before we get there, there is still a lot to happen.

Using a Raspberry Pi makes running a Bee node cheap and reliable. With DappNode, installing Bee is a breeze.

As you probably know, we released the “Swarm Live” version of Swarm on 24 November 2020. This version has a lot more stability and improved performance, and it also has all the high-level features of the Swarm 1.0 release.

November has been an important month for Swarm. Another milestone was met — the Swarm Live release. Improved performance, more stability, and polished features are just a few of the things this new release has to offer

By 25 January 2021, the cluster of nodes running the old Swarm network maintained by the Swarm team will be brought offline. As of this date, the proof of concept network is considered deprecated and the old Swarm codebase will no longer be maintained by the Swarm team. Those running services on the old testnet are encouraged to arrange for immediate migration to the new Bee client.

Swarm Live was launched on Tuesday, 24 November 2020. All the polished, new, and improved features were discussed in detail at the Swarm Live online event, where the team presented not only what’s new, but also many other interesting topics, the Swarm incentives among them.

Swarm Live is the last official release before the final product release. It has all the high-level features in place.

October was a very busy month for the Swarm team. While the developers worked hard on the Swarm Live release, which is to be announced on 24 November 2020, the comms team spent their time restructuring the way they work. The HR team was busy too and onboarded a few brilliant and experienced developers who will be a nice addition to the existing dev team.

Swarm is happy to announce yet another important milestone on the roadmap: Swarm Live. This special occasion will be celebrated with another online event, where all the new, improved, and polished features will be presented.

Swarm is happy to announce yet another important milestone on the roadmap: Swarm Live. This special occasion will be celebrated with another online event, where all the new, improved, and polished features will be presented.

The Swarm Mainnet Launch will be complete on June 21st.