Monthly Development Update — December 2022

Swarm Foundation
Ethereum Swarm
Published in
3 min readJan 5, 2023

December was a big month for releases. Bee 1.10 was released on the mainnet and with it Storage Incentives Phase 2. The latter allows node operators to participate in the redistribution of storage fees. Over the next few weeks, the research team will be watching closely to see how the new mechanism performs as it brings Phase 3 closer to release.

Along with the new Bee, new Bee-js and Swarm Desktop versions have also been released to ensure compatibility with the latest Bee client version.

Fair Data Protocol (FDP) also had a major release in December. You can now use Fairdrive, a private and decentralised drive, directly from your desktop with a simple executable binary. To familiarise yourself with the FDP stack, there is an FDP tutorial app available and an FDP overview video from the Swarm Odyssey 2023 event.

Speaking of Swarm Odyssey 2023, a new wave of grants was announced at the event. So if you want to build on Swarm, check out the blog for more information.

And from December 2022 on, all blog posts, including Monthly Development Update, have moved to Swarm’s self-hosted blog. Don’t worry, they will also be available on Medium for now.

Have fun reading.

Bee Track

New Bee Release 1.10 was deployed on the mainnet:

This release includes Storage Incentives Phase 2: the redistribution feature is a breaking change and old versions are not able to connect to the new version, therefore node operators are recommended to upgrade to this version as soon as possible

Here are the release notes: https://github.com/ethersphere/bee/releases/tag/v1.10.0

JS Track

New Bee-js release, version 5.1.1 (2022–12–21). Read more about the release here.

This is a small release that brings compatibility with the Bee 1.10.0 release and bug fixes:

  • Backward compatibility for wallet endpoint
  • Staking endpoint url change

New Swarm Desktop release, version 0.17.0

This release is compatible with the Bee 1.10.0 release and contains numerous improvements and fixes.

On Windows and macOS this is an automatic update, whereas Linux users have to manually download and install the latest version.

Full release notes and link to download:

https://github.com/ethersphere/swarm-desktop/releases/tag/v0.17.0

Fair Data Protocol

  • A desktop variant of Fairdrive has been released. It allows users to FUSE mount Fairdrive (FairOS) as a folder on their computers and work with files on the local desktop. #fairdrive channel on Discord for support.
  • For developers to get acquainted with the FDP stack, an FDP tutorial app has been prepared, showing how to make an example TODO app both using fdp-storage typescript library or using FairOS APIs. The example TODO app repos are available for fdp-storage as well as FairOS.
  • An overview of the Fair Data Protocol, the tooling available and future steps are presented in the video presentation, part of the Swarm Odyssey 2023 event.

DevOps Track

  • Deployed Bee to the mainnet (v1.10.0).
  • Released the Beekeeper (v0.11.13).

Research Track

  • Phase 2 of the Storage Incentives was released to mainnet and is being closely monitored for all behaviours and events, and no doubt optimisations will be made over the coming weeks involving further developments of the redistribution contract.
  • Rewriting and testing of the Oracle for Phase 3 and further research documentation will be underway from New Year onwards.

Ecosystem

Events

Upcoming events

  • Monthly Ecosystem Call, 26 January 2023

Join Swarm’s community

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Swarm Foundation
Ethereum Swarm

Swarm is a system of peer-to-peer networked nodes that create a decentralised storage. Website: https://www.ethswarm.org/