Monthly Development Update — April 2021

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 team was getting ready for the Swarm v0.6.0 release. Some of you had a chance to get a taste of it at the public demo with Rinke Hendriksen.
• The JS team released the Bee dashboard that will make it easier to install and operate nodes.
• Fair Data Society organized a nice, two-day long event that covered topics related to the fair data economy and provided educational videos for the web3 community.

You can read the monthly development progress report in more detail below.

Bee Track

• Worked on the following features:

1.) Postage stamps

2.) Light nodes

3.) File/manifest redefinition

4.) Pinning CRUD API

• Held a demo session with the community
• Started collaborating more extensively with the community on Discord (#bee-testing)
• Implemented various features to improve the stability of the network

DevOps Track

• Released a new version of Bee Helm chart (v0.9.0).
• Released a new version of Beekeeper Helm chart (v0.2.5).
• Released a new version of Geth Swap Helm chart (v0.1.12).
• Released a new version of Beekeeper (v0.6.4) with integration testing improvements.
• Updated bee-staging and bee-local repos to support the latest Bee and Beekeeper improvements.

JS Track

• Released new versions of Bee-js Javascript client library (v0.8.1). Highlights from the releases since the last update:

1.) Added missing Bee API endpoints

2.) Improved the signer interface and Ethereum wallet support

3.) Easier handling of binary and JSON data

4.) BigInt support for money related APIs

• Released the 0.1.0 version of Bee Dashboard (previously known as Bee Status UI). You can read more about it in our medium post.

Research Track

• Established a way to combine time-based settlements with monetary settlements.
• Breakthrough in simplifying a secure postage lottery (i.e., mining algo for positive storage incentives), to be implemented after 1.0
• Sybil resistant node addressing

Ecosystem Track

Fair Data Society organized a two-day event called FDS Days. The purpose of the event was to educate the web3 community about topics related to the fair data economy and to provide video materials for educational purposes. All the videos are uploaded to the Fair Data Society YouTube channel and you are invited to rewatch the talks if you missed the event.