Building, Advising, and Educating: Sway Gang’s Mission in the Modular Blockchain Space
Blockchain architectures are at an inflection point. Many monolithic blockchains (those that handle the 4 core functions of Consensus, Execution, and Data Availability on a single layer) have tried to solve the Scalability Trilemma, but progress is either slow or halted.
Now the industry is shifting its attention toward other solutions as a potential path forward. One of which is modular blockchains. The modular blockchain movement was birthed through the emergence of Fuel, Celestia, and the concepts of roll-ups and sharding on Ethereum.
In this article, we, Sway Gang, talk about our origins, why we are drawn to modularity and Fuel, and what we want to achieve in this space. If you like what you see, we’d love to have you follow us on our journey.
The Origins of Sway Gang
Hey, we’re Sway Gang. We’re a team of builders that emerged during the Eth Lisbon Hackathon. At the event, we achieved recognition and won a bounty from Fuel Network for creating a price oracle feed in 6 hours. Check out that project on GitHub here.
As you can infer, our core tenet is to build with the Sway programming language on Fuel Network. But there’s more.
- We educate the community through events, articles, and tutorials for developers.
- We advocate for the growth and marketing of our projects, and of Sway and Fuel as a whole.
- We advise other teams on how to build, grow, or pivot in the blockchain space.
Why Modularity? Why Fuel? Why Sway?
Modularity
Sway Gang has been around the block. We’ve built on several chains, including Ethereum, Solana, Near, and Waves before landing on Fuel and modular blockchains. After spending time in the crypto industry, we’ve made the following observations:
- Ethereum is and will always be the most robust community in Crypto — the network is here to stay.
- No single blockchain can resolve the Scalability Trilemma, no web2 applications could either.
- Humans are the most important part of any team or project — they build the tech and are flexible.
Keeping the above three points in mind, we think that modularity is either the future of crypto or a big step toward it. With modular blockchain architecture Ethereum stays, new focused networks address gaps in the scalability trilemma, and strong project teams are given the freedom to experiment with new tech without isolating the communities they’ve built. This approach is revolutionary and Sway Gang is fully onboard for the ride. Instead of being limited to a fixed set of resources, we can choose the layers that best fit our specific use cases. Ultimately the flexibility leads to faster and more efficient development and deployment of blockchain-based applications.
Fuel
Quoting the article Modular blockchains & Getting started w/Fuel, “In the modular blockchain architecture, the execution, data availability, and consensus are separate layers, Fuel is the fastest Execution Layer for modular blockchains.” Fuel Network was created by Fuel Labs, a core team that is also focused on deploying developer tools for building on Fuel.
Four things that drew our team to Fuel are:
- Fuel Virtual Machine (FuelVM) was built based on EVM, Solana, WASM, Bitcoin, and Cosmos learnings. Read about how FuelVM compares with EVM here.
- Fuel Network supports parallel transaction execution.
- Fuel Labs is focused on creating developer tools. Their contributions include the Sway programming language and the Fuel orchestrator (Forc) toolchain.
- Fuel is not closely tied to any Layer 1 and can be deployed in many different use-case-specific configurations.
Different implementations of Fuel are visually depicted below:
Sway
As mentioned above, the Sway language was created by Fuel Labs to support the development on Fuel Network. Sway is a great smart contract language created on top of battle-tested Rust, by refined engineers, using the latest concepts and approaches in smart contract development.
If we could explain Sway in one sentence it would be this: Sway has addressed all the Rust security issues and redefined scalability.
What Do We Want to Achieve and How?
A quote from one of Sway Gang’s key members, “Our goal is to push Fuel to its limits. We want to override it as Niki Lauda would drive Ferraris.”
Let’s dig into what that means.
We want to scale Fuel by bringing new developers to the ecosystem, attracting end users from all corners of the globe (both degens and institutions alike), and making the network a primary curve of scalability for the Ethereum ecosystem. Along with that, we’re also looking toward Celestia in the spirit of experimentation and modular blockchain architecture.
To meet our goals, we’ll be building as much as possible in the coming months to bring early adoption to various projects, and get hands-on experience with the protocol in an effort to help educate others. The community should expect plenty of educational material from Sway Gang. As we build, encounter challenges, and fix issues, we will construct tutorials leveraging our experience. The tutorials will manifest as articles, videos, online demos, and even IRL workshops and events. Our hope is to foster a strong community and provide current and prospective Fuel builders a much-needed boost when they encounter difficulties that we’ve already addressed in the past.
Until Next Time
Thanks for checking in on Sway Gang and learning about our mission. We’ll be publishing more exciting content for the community on our Medium page and are in the process of setting up an official website, stay tuned! If our goals and projects interest you, connect with the team on Twitter, GitHub, and Discord. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have feedback or questions — we’d love to chat.
Lastly, if you’re new to modular blockchain architecture, Fuel Network, or Celestia, check out the links below to learn more.
