Unveiling Swarm: a project that can change the world

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Building an self-sovereign digital society — — this idea stems from an assumption of Vitalik Buterin, the genius founder of Ethereum, who once joked: “Ethereum is a trinity.”

The trinity he referred to, of course, is not the Holy Trinity as it’s known in religion, but the three parts that make up a computer — — “processing”, “communication” and “storage”.

The year 2015 is highlighted by a phenomenal moment when the Ethereum mainnet was launched, sending out the first-ever boot sound of the world computer. However, it stops short of being a perfect prototype due to inadequacies in storage and communication which pale in comparison with its powerful processing ability.

If Ethereum is the CPU of this world computer, Swarm must be the hard drive.

Originally, Swarm was only designated to be the storage system for Ethereum. As the project grows and prospers, it begins to incorporate communication, another part of the trinity, gradually into its network, making it an increasingly integral part of Ethereum.

“Storage and communication constitute the infrastructure of an self-sovereign digital society”, wrote the Swarm team in its officially published “Book of Swarm”, showing the great ambition of Swarm and Ethereum. The ultimate goal is to create an self-sovereign digital society — — a society that is safe, trustworthy, anti-censorship, zero-outage, and self-sustaining. In other words, Swarm, replacing traditional Internet, aspires to lead mankind into a new era called Web3.0.

The important role of BZZ in Swarm

The word Swarm literally means “a large group”, its logo resembles a honeycomb and its official client is named Bee, so it does not take a genius to see the brand inspiration comes from bees, a swarm of very special insects. The token is named BZZ by Vitalik Buterin as if to deliberately mimic the buzzing sound of flying bees.

Bees are widely known as a kind of well-disciplined insects, with each doing its own bit in an orderly fashion. Parallels can be drawn between bees and nodes in blockchain, the latter all pulling together towards one same goal, safeguarding the blockchain ecosystem. When it comes to Swarm, maintaining a world-scale data storage system is the ultimate goal. But the concept of peer-to-peer data storage system materialized long before Swarm, with actual functioning product, for example BitTorrent which stores and distributes data effectively in a decentralized manner.

Since there already exists a system that stands up to the task, why Swarm is still created?

The answer lies in BZZ. As bees are toiling for sweet honey, nodes that store and distribute data also need incentives to sustain such “hard labor”, otherwise why bother maintaining such a system at the cost of one’s own storage capacity and internet speed?

Then BZZ comes along the way, rising to the challenge by introducing an incentive system which is critically important for an self-sovereign digital society to sustain itself, tackling the long-existing thorn in the side of protocols like BitTorrent. The “Book of Swarm” states that swap protocol and incentive systems such as swear and swindle are deployed to ensure fees and rewards in data storage and distribution are properly managed. And BZZ, as a utility token, can be fully utilized in this incentive system.

How can I get this promising BZZ?

The total supply of BZZ stands at 62.5 million, to be released without lockups according to credible sources. Swarm mainnet is expected to be launched in Q2 this year, with no clear information about its mining arrangements. Its beta version has been launched for testing with one million BZZs currently being airdropped to reward early users for their active role in the stress test. The airdrop campaign is dubbed “The Rise of Bee”.

What’s worth mentioning is these BZZs are not just distributed or airdropped directly to users, but have to be exchanged with a cheque. The way to get a cheque is very interesting. 35 “Queen Bee Nodes” (qBZZ) are randomly selected during the test with their identity kept unknown, even team members cannot get hold of a clue that reveals a slightest bit of information. To get a cheque, nodes have to interact with these queen bee nodes. The exchange rate between BZZ and cheques will be decided in accordance with the final number of cheques generated.

Swarm is in the spotlight, prompting many companies rushing to deploy it. Those who have gained the upper hand by deploying early are now working around the clock to launch exchange services for BZZ. Leading the pack is LBank Cloud which, since March, has obtained more than 60,000 cheques and the number is still growing. Turning to specialized service providers like LBank Cloud is the best option for those who either don’t want to or don’t know how to deploy nodes for testnet mining. By doing so, users are not only exempted from cumbersome procedures, but also enjoy enhanced rate of obtaining a cheque.

How BZZ mining is going to be carried out fuels lots of speculation. It’s highly likely based on previous observance that Swarm will adopt a mining mechanism similar to that of Filecoin by staking BZZ for mining. Of course, it comes down to the official website to announce the final version.

Swarm embraces a future of infinite potential

Trying to search something but constantly interrupted by annoying pop-up ads, sounds familiar? I believe this strikes a chord with most of us. And sometimes we are shockingly baffled by these ads for their uncannily accurate grasp of our needs, only to find that our privacy is being unwittingly compromised. It seems somewhat inevitable that privacy is being traded for interest, given the fact a handful of centralized giants get hold of most of users’ data. Malicious incidents of data theft and data abuse occur more frequently, prompting people to question the mainstream data storage system and reflect on the painful cost we have paid for the system loopholes.

It is this dilemma that Swarm wants to break.

The ultimate goal of Swarm and Ethereum is to build an self-sovereign digital society where users’ data only belong to themselves with no worries about their data being abused by centralized companies or organizations. Meanwhile, by maintaining such a decentralized data network, they will be rewarded with BZZ, thus creating a self-sustaining digital society with virtuous incentive system.

Swarm and Ethereum reapproached the way networks are constructed from a new perspective. Their success will usher in a decentralized Web 3.0 era which brings enormous potential.

Articles and reports published by Tuoniao do not constitute any investment advice!

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