Monthly Development Update — September 2020
September has been an amazing month for Swarm. Not only have we released Swarm Beta, which you are more than welcome to try out for yourself, but we’ve also held a day-long online launch event packed with workshops and talks. We’ve touched upon some very interesting aspects of Swarm, with a focus on the ecosystem and also our developer team demonstrated the new features in Beta.
We are inviting you to read the Swarm Beta release notes and the development update to see all the work that was done in the previous month.
Swarm Beta (Release v0.3.0) — Release Notes
Bee Beta contains the required features to build rich applications on top of Swarm. This release adds:
- Bandwidth incentives (on the Görli test network) are enabled by default
- Zero-leak messaging (Pss)
- External signer support (Clef)
- Improved sync and download performance
- Breaking changes on protocol level (TL;DR — just update your nodes)
Try it out and get in touch at our BeeHive or Telegram!
Milestone
Bee’s third release marks a major milestone of the Bee project; we believe that developers can now unleash rich applications over Swarm with a good balance of performance and security. We understand that as the Swarm ecosystem develops, developers might need access to low-level APIs in order to develop a rich application experience, we therefore also offer a set of low-level APIs that allow you to interact with the Swarm network in your own, custom way.
We invite you to use our APIs. Your feedback would be beneficial for us to further improve them in the future.
Breaking changes
Several breaking changes were introduced with this version. You are advised to update your nodes promptly.
Bandwidth incentives
Bee Beta contains the basis for the Swarm bandwidth incentives. You will now earn gBZZ (Görli BZZ) by running your Swarm node.
Conversely, you are required to pay with gBZZ in order to upload and download content. You can get gBZZ at our faucet — check our documentation on how to fund your node’s chequebook.
Zero-leak messaging
Bee Beta releases the second iteration of Pss (Postage service over swarm). Pss is zero-leak messaging over Swarm that allows for confidential, anonymous and untraceable node-to-node communication. Pss comes with a websocket API that allows clients to send a message to a recipient on an overlay address as well as to subscribe to a topic and receive messages.
External signer
Bee now supports an external signer (Clef) for security reasons to allow private keys not to be exposed to the client process.
Speed improvements
Uploading and downloading data to Bee is now significantly more performant than it used to be(e).
Documentation
All new features are documented in our documentation.
Tracks
Core
- Bee beta v0.3.0 is released
- Implemented SWAP (bandwidth incentives) for retrieval and push sync, enabled by default on the Görli test network
- Website hosting features are extended with directory index and error documents options
- Implemented PSS messaging with encryption and exposed over WebSockets API
- Major download speed improvements by utilizing readahead buffering
- Support for Clef as external signer
- Added tracing spans for retrieval and push sync protocols
- Fixed retrieval loops in network neighbourhoods
- Added the Gateway mode option for publicly exposed nodes
- Added new endpoints in Debug API
- Overall code improvements and minor fixes
DevOps
- Deployed Bee (v0.3.0) to all public clusters during Beta release
- Released new version of Bee Helm chart (v0.5.13) with support for swap, clef, external secrets and pregenerated swarm keys
- Released new version of Beekeeper (v0.3.3) with balances and settlements integration tests and improved local pinning, chunk repair and pull sync tests
- Released new version Beekeeper Helm chart (v0.1.4) that support latest Beekeeper version
- Upgraded Helm charts and repo to support Helm 3
- Updated bee-staging and bee-local repos to support latest Bee/Beekeeper versions
- Enabled alerting for Swarm cluster
- Configured auto deploy on Swarm staging cluster for every merge on master
- Enabled geth for infrastructure tests
Ecosystem
- Swarm’s ecosystem is growing fast. Se the list of projects which received the grants in the first wave.
- A new wave of grants has been announced at the Swarm Beta event. In case you missed your chance at the Alpha event, you are welcome to apply for the grants here.
Events
- Swarm Beta online event took place on Monday, 28th September 2020. In case you missed the event you can still watch the content on Youtube. All recordings from the event will be live in a few days. Follow our Twitter or Reddit for the links.
Demo Videos
Join our community
- The Swarm team is reachable on Discord. All tech-support and other channels moved there. Please join us on Discord!
- Follow us on Twitter.
- Discussions about Swarm on /r/ethswarm and /r/ethereum subreddits.
- Please feel free to reach out via info@ethswarm.org
- Swarm up your inbox with our monthly newsletter! Subscribe here.
