The development of the Swarm network and its associated ecosystem continues to move forward at the set pace. Bee client 1.9.0 is out and the team behind Bee is fully focused on meeting the timelines for bringing storage incentives to mainnet (they are already available for preview on testnet). There’s also a new BeeJS in the pipeline, which brings an array of breaking changes.

Working closely with the Bee and BeeJS track, the research team has reviewed Phases 1&2 of storage incentives on testnet and is already working on optimisations. Specifications for the rent oracle are now complete and the latter is entering the private testing phase.

The Fair Data Protocol (FDP) team has had their hands full in the last month as well. Personal Storage metadata encryption has been merged in FDP-Storage to the main branch and a 0.6 version of the Swarm Extension for Chrome is out. Regarding the extension, the team is progressing in manifest v3 transition, whose features have been causing them quite a lot of grey hair. Blossom’s new signer interface is coming along nicely and a command line interface that uses FDP-storage is under development too.

On the community side, Devcon VI in Colombia was October’s main event, where a strong delegation from both the Swarm Foundation and Association were present. The activities started well before the official event, with Swarm Foundation co-organising the Infinite Genesis hackathon that produced some great solutions that used Swarm decentralised storage.

There are also some great events coming up in the following weeks and months, so be sure to check the rest of the blog for more details.

Enjoy the read

Bee Track

This release includes a myriad of hardenings and bug fixes that can be found below. The storage incentives can be previewed on the testnet, but as a feature it is not enabled on the mainnet. For more details read the full release notes Bee 1.9.0
Full attention on testing Phase 2 of storage incentives.
Working on a project to improve the local storage situation.

JS Track

There is a new version of Bee-js in the pipeline which is going to change the package to be an EcmaScript Module (ESM). This is an ongoing upgrade in the Javascript ecosystem and it brings a lot of breaking changes, so it is rolled out slowly and carefully. Currently there is a pre-release version already on npm, so developers can try it out and upgrade other dependencies if needed. It also contains bug fixes and improvements and is planned to be released in the upcoming weeks.

Fair Data Protocol

Fdp-storage

Personal Storage metadata encryption is merged in FDP-Storage to the main branch. The release will happen after the ongoing Fairdrive implementation of this feature.
Carried out a solution to use FDP-Storage in React Native applications. The developers have to use our recommended shimming on the BeeJS upload method that allows uploading data. This is documented in the readme file of the project
Added portable account reupload feature which can be used if the credentials are garbage collected from the Swarm network.

Swarm extension

Released v0.6 of Swarm Extension in which we updated the bee-dashboard dependency that fixed the issue with the folder/website uploads. With this, its UI also got aligned with the Swarm Desktop.
Added support for subdomain redirection.
Progressing in manifest v3 transition of the project, where we may drop subdomain redirection feature and FakeURL concept. For the latest, we are planning to substitute its functionality with BeeJS proxy object that keeps the same interface that BeeJS has, but the dApps communicate with the extension instead of the Bee client directly. Having a proxy like this hides the connection details of the used Bee client from the dApps.

Blossom

ci and testing related improvements
Working on the signer interface for dApps. This will have a similar interface that Metamask or other wallet handler applications have, but the key that dApps can interact with will be an application specific derived key from the user’s HD wallet (The key of the application pod).

FIPs

Finalizing portable account workflow in this document. Please, give suggestions on it before it is being accepted (end of the next week).
Started working on the Personal Storage FIP. It will describe how FairOS/FDP-Storage handles pods, how it uses feeds and what metadata it stores about files and directories. Discussion is possible on FDS Discord.
Swarm DB PR for utilising BeeSon and creating a decentralised database. The author waits for any feedback on the topic.

FDP-CLI

Continued the application development to have a command line interface that uses FDP-Storage.
Portable account login and account handling is merged to the main branch.

DevOps Track

Kubernetes clusters (production and staging) upgraded to version 1.21
CI/CD speed improvements
New bee version (1.9.0) deployment on mainnet
Testnet deployments

Research Track

Storage incentives phase 1&2 reviewed on testnet with functionality as expected and working on optimisation
Phase 3 price/rent Oracle has been specified and completed and in the process of modelling and testing privately before wider testnet release
Plans have been made and are being continuously assessed for the release of the storage incentives to mainnet
Full focus is on the price oracle.

Ecosystem Track

Sovr — Sovr is a stable tooling that lets users dive into the world of decentralised compute pods
Laibach X Swarm Decentralisation of art — Laibach plans to start the process of self-decentralisation by releasing a limited series of NFTs that will allow the owners to enter a social-artistic experiment with multiple potential outcomes.

Ongoing bounties

Events

🗓️ The Swarm Foundation was at Devcon!

The Devcon video archive is now available on the Swarm network
Run a light or full Bee node — A Devcon workshop by Attila Gazsó
Devcon, held the agenda on Swarm. Attendees were able to view the full agenda hosted on Swarm.

🗓️ World Ethical Data Forum

Swarm Foundation sponsored the World Ethical Data Forum and Swarm Foundations Director Gregor Žavcer gave a presentation on what a fair data economy might look like in a world with an ever more voracious appetite for personal data.

🗓️ Monthly Ecosystem call