Monthly Development Update – June 2026

June was a month of steady, practical progress across the Swarm stack. With the v2.8.0 security release out the door, the Bee team got back on its regular track and closed the month with the next patch, v2.8.1, locked in and publicly announced for July 7. On the tooling side, Bee-JS shipped a round of fixes while preparing a larger security-minded cleanup for its next release, Swarm-CLI redesigned its ACT access control around a single access command, and Swarm Gateway and Bee Factory continued to stabilize as developer infrastructure. Across the wider ecosystem, Solar Punk delivered reliability and UX fixes for Swarm Desktop and Bee Dashboard while pushing ahead on AI marketplaces and video streaming. And beyond the code, Swarm spent a full week out in the world at Berlin Blockchain Week — talks, panels, workshops, and a collective livecoding experiment — with the June Community Call bringing the field report home.

Bee Track

• June was a stabilization-and-planning month for the Bee team. With v2.8.0 out the door, the team got back on its normal track and started picking up the work that had been shelved during the security release. The month closed with the next patch (2.8.1) locked in but deliberately pushed a week to July 7 after testing surfaced late bugs — a date that had already been announced publicly on June 30. On the network side, bootnodes and around 10% of mainnet nodes now support WSS, and there were also improvements to Beekeeper. For the important parts of what’s in the release, see the release announcement.

JS Track

Apps

Bee-JS

No major changes were released, only fixes. We released 3 versions; the latest is v12.2.2.

• Removed the BeeDev class

Coming in the next release, after Bee 2.8.1 ships:

• We removed axios from the library and started using native fetch instead, since axios had several security issues recently.
• We started using zod for schema validation, which results in a cleaner codebase.
• We improved stability by introducing a check in the repository, which we can trigger to test the library with a React Native test project.
• Added minimumValidityBlocks to the GET /chainstate response.
• Added updatePostageBatchLabel and renameStorage (same functionality) functions to be able to update a postage batch’s label.
• We started validating the port of the Bee API URL, preventing users from using ‘bad ports’.

Swarm-CLI

We continued improving the UX to make the CLI more convenient to use. The latest version is v3.3.0.

• Redesigned and reimplemented ACT — the main command is now access; you can read more details in the CLI docs.
• Deprecated the grantee command and old ACT-related flags (e.g. download –act or –act-history-address).
• When the Bee API URL is a gateway, we no longer require a stamp.

Swarm Gateway

• Introduced readiness mode, configurable via the READINESS_MODE env variable; values can be ‘strict’ or ’normal’ (default).
• Added a new endpoint to query global batches by owner (/batches/owner/:owner).

Bee Factory

This month we spent time stabilizing the current state of Bee Factory and continued adding back features (that we had previously) to the rewrite.

• We introduced automated Docker image caching: on every new master push, we build and push a Docker image to Docker Hub with the latest tag. This GitHub Actions workflow can also be triggered manually with a tag parameter in GitHub’s UI.
• Nodes now run on 1633 + 2 * n ports (1633, 1635, 1637, etc.).
• Cheque generation got stabilized.

Ecosystem

Solar Punk

• Swarm Desktop & Bee Dashboard saw a round of reliability and UX fixes across both apps — a rare startup restart loop and macOS binary issue were resolved, and the dashboard gained clearer transaction-failure messages, friendlier stamp top-up/dilute, and a range of smaller usability improvements, many of them community-reported.
• On the AI side, we continued work on Data-enriched AI Marketplaces (AI Foundational Economy) — initiating Swarm Market MCP with an item catalog-creation tool, verifying catalog output against ERC-8004, and testing the end-to-end payment flow — while progressing buyer and seller agents.
• Our video streaming work advanced with scaled-up load testing for live-stream segment delivery, an HLS player quality-of-experience overlay, and a transcoding-engine experiment, alongside kicking off the design for Swarmcast, our next-generation streaming effort.
• The team also prepared talks, a panel, and a hands-on workshop for Berlin Blockchain Week.

DevRel

Content

• Bee v2.8.1 Release Announcement
• Monthly Development Update – May 2026
• State of the Network: May 2026
• Swarm Community Call, 28 May – Recap

Events

Swarm Community Call – 25 June

June’s Swarm Community Call covered the upcoming Bee 2.8.1 release — what’s in it and what node operators should know — along with the latest research updates on protocol work, tokenomics, and network stability. The In Focus segment brought a field report from Berlin Blockchain Week: what stood out, where Swarm connected to the wider ecosystem, and the story behind The Plural Monolith, a collective livecoding music experiment. The call closed with the community AMA and open discussion.

You are welcome to watch the full event recording here.

Swarm at Berlin Blockchain Week

Swarm was active across Berlin Blockchain Week with a program that leaned into the practical edge of decentralization. The week started on 14 June at the Web3Privacy Now Neocypherpunk Summit at Funkhaus, where we delivered a talk, hosted a panel, and closed the day with The Plural Monolith — a collective livecoding music experiment together with DarkFi and WinPrivacy. From there the team joined Berlin Ethereum Day (15 June), Dappcon (16–17 June), Web3 Summit (18 June), and the AI Agents Summit (20 June), and gave a dedicated talk at DeSci.Berlin (19 June). We wrapped up the week on 20 June at Brew with four hands-on workshops and a presentation, focused on shipping with Swarm.

Upcoming events

Swarm Community Call – 30 July

The next Swarm Community Call will take place on Thursday, 30 July, as usual on the last Thursday of the month, at 17:00 CET – broadcast on the Swarm Foundation’s X or YouTube.

People & Culture team

If you are interested in joining the team and believe you have outstanding skills, visit our careers page https://www.ethswarm.org/jobs or simply drop us a message at talent@ethswarm.org!