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. In his recap of last month’s work, he highlighted the release of Swarm Desktop (Beta). Since its release on 21 June, the dApp has already received some major improvements.

The community helped make the Swarm Desktop better

Based on feedback from the community, the installation flow has already been improved and the team has added an automatic update feature. The feedback has also been very useful in identifying various pain points. These are various issues that have caused the most headaches for users. From setting up an RPC endpoint to transferring funds to the xDAI network.

As Attila pointed out, all this information helped to address the pain points and make Swarm Desktop even easier to use. Either by simplifying the user experience or by creating relevant documentation. “We’re also automating the aspects of the dApp that can be automated,” he added. Version 1.0 of the dApp is therefore a matter of getting the installation and automatic update flow right, Attila concluded.

He then gave a brief overview of the changes in the new version of the Bee client. These, he explained, include new features required by the Swarm Desktop and by other general upgrades such as the start of the development of storage incentives.

FDP is focused on releasing Blossom

Following Attila, it was time for Angela Vitzthum to come on stage with the latest updates from Fair Data Protocol (FDP). Over the last month, the FDP team has been pushing hard towards an August release of Blossom, a browser extension based on FDP. “It provides a complete tracless Web3 browsing and is the first user-facing application of the Fair Data Protocol,” Angela explained.

The team is also working on the FDP command line interface and has released FDP Play 2.0.1 that spins up the entire Fair Data Society environment in Docker. As for Fairdrive, the main effort is currently focused on migrating it from FairOS to FDP storage.

The FDP team has also spent the last few months building up its bounty pipeline and has eight bounties up for grabs, with more on the way.

A freedom corner at EthCC and WAM Sessions all year round

Constanza Gallo was next up on the mic. In her vivid summary, she described how the Swarm Foundation and Swarm Association delegations tried to raise awareness of the Swarm network at EthCC in Paris.

The main attraction was the freedom of speech corner, where anyone could take the stage and say what they wanted to say. People could also express their opinions through different mediums such as poems and paintings. A big thank you to everyone who took the time to create. As a thank you, these artworks will live an immortal life as NFTs on the Swarm network!

At the end of her presentation, Constanza reminded everyone that the 50,000 DAI “Wikipedia on Swarm” prize is still open for another month.

The next announcement came from Mina Špiler. Following a successful first episode in June, the WAM (We Are Millions) Sessions will now take place regularly. These will be a kind of fireside chats focusing on privacy, digital freedom and art and how they relate to Web3.

A new episode will air on 9 August, diving into the question of free press in a digital society.

Panel: Centralisation in Web3

The call concluded with a panel discussion on Web3 and how the use of certain centralised services affects it. The panellists were Attila Gaszo and Leonardo Bautista-Gomez, an expert in supercomputing, the Ethereum staking network and distributed systems.

Both speakers agreed that developers are being pragmatic when using certain services and that decentralisation isn’t an absolute value but rather a spectrum. Since crypto in general is still an early technology, they need to use centralised services that can later be replaced by decentralised ones.

They see no immediate danger of Ethereum losing its decentralisation. On the contrary, with the upcoming “Merge”, it is poised to increase. The problem could arise from developers opting en masse for centralised services such as Infura. According to Leonardo Bautista-Gomez this could create central points of failure on which a lot of people depend.

Next Monthly Ecosystem Call on 25 August

The next Monthly Ecosystem Call will be on 25 August, with a focus on the Swarm Desktop (Beta) and Swarm network storage incentives.