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.

The seven-day hackathon was full of valuable announcements, demos, and talks. Five of the competing teams made it to the end and produced their own thin dApp on Swarm, each earning them the event’s first prize (5000 BZZZ tokens).

A 1 million BZZ token airdrop was announced, and almost five thousand new Bee nodes were installed.

Without further ado, dive into the detailed report of the team’s work below.

Core Track

1.) Released Bee 0.5.1

2.) Released Bee 0.5.2

3.) Work on postage stamps

✓ Send postage stamps with chunk via protocols

✓ Let the garbage collector make choices based on postage value

✓ Create two allowances for storage: reserve & cache

✓ Start integration testing

4.) Work on variable pricing for bandwidth accounting

✓ Initialize own price table

✓ Communicate price table upon connection

✓ Communicate subsequent changes via protocol headers

DevOps Track

1.) Deployed Bee (v0.5.1) to public cluster.

2.) Released a new version of Bee Helm chart (v0.6.7).

3.) Released a new version of Beekeeper (v0.4.6) with dynamic clusters improvements.

4.) Updated bee-staging and bee-local repos to support the latest Bee/Beekeeper versions.

5.) Published Bee Docker image for ARM

JS Track

1.) Released Bee-js Javascript client library 0.5.0 version to support breaking changes of Bee 0.5

2.) Released Bee-js 0.5.1 (beta) version with support for Feeds and SOCs

✓ Support for uploading and downloading Single Owner Chunks

✓ Support for uploading and downloading Feeds

✓ Added utility and convenience functions

✓ Security and bug fixes

Research track

1.) Explore migrating swap settlement onto ethereum layer 2

2.) Explore alternatives to mitigate ethereum main net high gas prices

Ecosystem Track

1.) A seven-day hackathon organized by Fair Data Society resulted in new thin dApps on Swarm, using Fairdrive and FairOS libraries. In case you missed the event, you can rewatch any of the topics on YouTube.

2.) The hackathon open day was packed with presentations from Swarm grant recipients. It was amazing to see how far they have progressed. Feel free to rewatch the presentations on YouTube.