Ethereum Swarm Team Newsletter — August 2019

Swarm tracks update

Core

Swarm core development is now focussed on completing the major stability improvements and preparing for release of swarm 0.5. The 0.5 series include a new feature, pinning, which allows users to locally pin content and prevent it from being garbage collected. A novel feature, push syncing, takes care of distributing chunks when upload to Swarm. This together with tags makes it possible to monitor when content becomes available for others, allowing eventually the long desired progress bar functionality on the frontend. The stream package has seen a complete rewrite, resulting in more reliable and performant pull syncing (rebalancing storage across nodes).

Communication

PSS is currently being rewired to remove dependency on Whisper, and to accommodate pluggable crypto schemes. The aim is to provide a generalized API that makes it possible to integrate any custom crypto in the actual running node binary, potentially even with different schemes for individual topics.

Adaptive modes

The first steps to make adaptive modes of operation possible have been completed. A new protocol for communicating capabilities between peers has been defined, and an API has been implemented for registering the capabilities with the node. The intention is to allow a flexible capabilities scheme that leaves interpretation up to each individual service. Code that includes access to (and filtering of) capabilities from the Kademlia is to be merged imminently, and the next step is to make the first working implementation that uses these capabilities within PSS to define whether or not the node participates in forwarding messages for the network or not.

Incentives

The incentives track celebrates its first major milestone. The first basic functional version of Swarm incentivization has been merged to the master branch of the Swarm go implementation. It only supports bandwidth incentivization for now; incentivization for messaging persistance will come in subsequent iterations. This milestone includes SWAP (Swarm Accounting Protocol) as well as settlement using simple swap, essentially a chequebook contract.
As part of this solution, Swarm nodes need to consent on message or data-unit prices as well as cyrptocurrency prices of the accounting unit (honey) for the settlement. This will be done using oracles on chain as proposed in the newly published SWIPs. A SWIP describing multi-cryptocurrency support for settlement of Swap imbalances will also be published soon.

Ethereum state on Swarm

We wrote history as the Trinity Phython Ethereum client and a Swarm node exchanged handshake with the new ‘bzzeth’ protocol. This is part of the effort to put the ethereum blockchain and state data on Swarm to enable Ethereum clients to query and sync the blockchain using the Swarm network. The first bigger milestone is to support the header chain, the initial phases of which are now complete and results and demonstration is coming at Devcon V. This community funded track is helped by our strategic partner, Datafund, to be joined by Epic Labs after Devcon.

SWIP

In our effort to consolidate the architecture of Swarm as well as facilitate multiple client implementations, we aspire to provide specs in the form of SWIPs (Swarm Improvement Proposal). There is steady progress in documenting the parts, we are committed to deliver a suite of SWIPs by the end of the year that covers the entirety of Swarm features.

Events

Swarm Breakout Session at DeVcon!

Get ready for a whole day of Swarming at DeVcon. Exact time and location of the Swarm Breakout Session is going to be announced soon. Meanwhile check out our agenda here.

Swarm Orange Summit videos

You can watch all talks from the Swarm Orange Summit here.

Berlin Blockchain Week — Web3 Summit

Aron Fischer and Tim Bansemer gave a short update about the project’s status and our focus areas for the upcoming months. Stay tuned for the next update at DeVcon!

Let’s stay in touch!

The Swarm team is reachable on Mattermost.

Discussions about Swarm on /r/ethswarm and /r/ethereum subreddits.

Please feel free to reach out via info@ethswarm.org

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