December 23, 2024
Foundation

Swarm Winter Solstice Event 2024: Time for real-world impact

This year’s Winter Solstice Event marked a decisive turning point. Now feature-complete, Swarm stands ready for its next chapter: to deliver on the promise of being the backbone of Web3.

Swarm Winter Solstice Event

2024: Swarm becomes feature complete

The past year has been a milestone one. The Swarm network achieved feature-completeness with several groundbreaking implementations. Erasure coding proved to be a game changer, ensuring data redundancy and resilience with the ability to reconstruct data even when portions are lost. The introduction of a fully decentralised price oracle has created a fair, transparent pricing system that autonomously balances supply and demand without central authority intervention.

Other significant achievements included the Access Control Trie (ACT) for enhanced privacy, doubled reserve size for improved node operator rewards, and GSOC opening possibilities for multi-user applications like forums and social media platforms.

Swarm in 2025: Bigger, faster, stronger

On the threshold of the coming year 2025, the newly appointed COO of the Swarm Foundation, Sándor A. Nagy, outlined an ambitious roadmap focussing on three key areas:

  • User experience,
  • Network enhancement
  • Economic model strengthening

The Foundation aims to make Swarm more accessible through multi-chain support and an in-browser client—a potential game changer for adoption.

Key priorities for 2025 include:

  • Improved upload and download speeds
  • Blockchain data storage support
  • Enhanced node operator rewards through improved bandwidth incentives
  • Seamless availability of large datasets
  • Tools for tracking and recording data provenance
  • Decentralised decision-making through DAO implementation**

Tracking AI data and streaming on Swarm

While Swarm’s technology is groundbreaking, it only becomes meaningful with an active community who take it into the real world. In the final section of the event, the spotlight therefore turned towards some of the most outstanding ecosystem efforts.

Swarm Foundation has awarded two fellowships this year, to Datafund and Solar Punk.

Datafund is using its fellowship to develop a toolkit for data and model provenance in decentralised AI, addressing the growing need for transparency and trust in data origins and transformations. The goal is to develop a toolkit for developers to easily include provenance in their applications, with the data stored on Swarm.

Another fellowship, awarded to Solar Punk, has already delivered three crucial libraries supporting audio-video streaming, live streaming, and group chat functionality. These developments, showcased at both the Swarm Summit and Devcon, are already attracting partner interest for building new applications.

Ecosystem highlights showcase real-world applications

The team behind the Fair Data Protocol (FDP) also demonstrated its ability to revolutionise Web3 data flows by seamlessly connecting different dApps via a shared storage. The presentation showed how data from one dApp can be easily ported to another and reused in a different context. The key features of the new data flow are interoperability, privacy control and a simplified user interface. Together, they form the scaffolding for a more sustainable economic model in which data owners retain control and benefit over their data.

Galaxis introduced its framework for creating unstoppable online communities, leveraging Swarm’s infrastructure to ensure communities remain fully in control and independent from third-party services. Galaxis aims to go beyond being just a platform but also a factory to create truly independent online communities.

The cypherpunk vision lives on

The event concluded with insights from Web3 Privacy’s PG and Mykola, who emphasised the importance of uniting different communities, chains, and layers around common privacy goals. Their grassroots movement, supported by Swarm Foundation, continues to educate and connect builders, highlighting the necessity for censorship-resistant storage for vulnerable communities.

As Swarm moves into 2025, the focus shifts from technical completion to practical implementation, aiming to make decentralised storage accessible and useful for everyone. The Foundation’s commitment to decentralisation, combined with a growing ecosystem of applications and tools, positions Swarm to fulfil its role as the backbone of a truly decentralised internet.

Honouring ldeffenb: A legacy of knowledge sharing

The event paused to honour the memory of ldeffenb, Swarm’s most passionate supporter and active community member, whose recent passing deeply affected the Swarm community. ldeffenb embodied the Swarm ethos through boundless patience and willingness to help. His motto “Share the Knowledge” will be encoded in the next Bee release’s welcome message, while the team will make sure that the content of the OpenStreetMap on Swarm (OSM), the project he built and maintained, will be kept in the network in his memory.

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