Swarm Community Call, 31 August — Recap

Summer is over and the Swarm Community Call on the last day of August was a great way to wrap it up. Here’s a recap for those who missed it.

Callum Toner from the Research Track opened the call with a spotlight on the latest releases related to the local store. By reverting some past offload behaviours and addressing the ‘Sharky leak’ bug, the team have shown their dedication to improving Swarm’s foundation.

The central highlight of Callum’s segment was the so-called Hardening Phase. He described a renewed approach whereby the team is keen on understanding and resolving the critical challenges users face with Swarm. The focus has now shifted to pragmatic, impactful solutions, which can be done in a shorter amount of time but have tangible benefits. The vision is clear: deliver enhancements that users truly feel. And the first one the team will tackle is the freezing of nodes in the redistribution game.

After the updates, Callum introduced Niki Papadatou who is our newly joined product owner. You will be hearing more from her in future Community Calls.

Improved bee-js, swarm-cli and bee-dashboard

Áron Soós presented some of the releases from the August Hackweek in Hungary. He took the audience through the latest updates for bee-js, swarm-cli and bee-dashboard.

The improved Bee-js SDK offers utility functions that enable users to do intricate calculations related to stamps, while swarm-cli’s “status” command has become more context-aware and can differentiate and present relevant data. With the ‘hash’ command addition, users can verify the integrity of a single file on their disk. The dashboard, too, saw significant changes: from selecting between mutable and immutable types to the ability to top up and dilute postage patches.

Get a reward for your SWIP

After the development updates, the Community Call shifted attention to the Swarm Improvement Proposals (SWIPs) segment. Swarm Foundation is encouraging submissions of proposals to improve Swarm, and has therefore announced rewards for the first 20 SWIPs, with larger rewards reserved for those SWIPs that find their way into future upgrades.

ENS on Swarm – the proposal

Speaking of proposals, Viktor Toth and Swarm Team Lead Viktor Trón submitted their own proposal that pairs Swarm with ENS (Ethereum Name Service) to deploy off-chain resolvers. The core benefit? Speed and cost efficiency compared to conventional blockchain methods.

You can read and comment on the proposal here, or you can become part of the larger bounty aimed at implementing this innovative idea.

The booting process reimagined

The DeBoot team concluded the call with the Community Talk segment. The team has taken on the challenge to update the booting process, which has remained largely untouched for years, and make it more compatible with a decentralised future.

In their demo they showed how Swarm could be used as a decentralised backend, akin to a decentralised Image Repository, from which a custom bootable image could be pulled and executed on any machine.

This conceptual bootloader would potentially lead to community-managed bootable image repositories with signatures stored on a public blockchain. The idea is to elevate convenience and empower users, encouraging a deeper understanding and control of their hardware.