The back waves of the Yangtze River pushed the front waves, and the spotlight of the decentralized storage track shone on Swarm this time.
Written by: Luff
If you ask, what is the deepest feeling for outsiders who have never participated in the vast crypto market? The answer may be that graphics cards, hard drives and even high-end games are expensive in Luoyang. The computer hardware necessary for ordinary people in the Internet age has experienced skyrocketing in the past year, and even the price has doubled at its highest.
Graphics cards have been heavily invested in Ethereum mining, which has also happened in previous years, but hard disk mining fever is the first time. No, after Filecoin and Chia, another distributed storage project Swarm also ushered in the online moment. The Swarm Foundation previously announced that it will soft-launch the Bee mainnet on June 13 and launch a public token sale on ColinList on June 15.
Swarm is well-known by the community because of the label of “Ethereum Foundation Project” (Note: Swarm has been spun off from the Ethereum Foundation as an independent project). Although it comes from a famous family, it appears to be extremely low-key. It was not until the airdrop plan was announced at the beginning of this year that it gradually attracted widespread attention.
What is Swarm?
Swarm’s official website introduced it like this, “Swarm is a decentralized storage and communication system for a sovereign digital society.”
Swarm is a system composed of peer-to-peer network nodes that can create decentralized storage and communication services. Thanks to the built-in incentive system executed by the smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, the system can realize self-operation economically.
Put aside cumbersome definitions and understand them literally. Swarm literally means “bee colony”. Swarm has a special liking for “Swarm”. Its latest client is named Bee. The token symbol BZZ also simulates the sound of bees flying.
Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned in the bitcintalk forum in 2011, “WikiLeaks kicked the horse’s nest, and the swarm is coming to us.” The swarm represents a distributed and collaborative core, which means that Swarm is The decentralized system guides participants in the ecosystem to cooperate with each other through mechanism design to jointly maintain ecological stability and development.
Famous backgrounds: proposed by Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood
The community talks about Swarm’s origin. The idea of Swarm was born from the early discussion of Ethereum by Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood. Vitalik Buterin once wrote an article recalling the prehistory of Ethereum. He mentioned:
Gavin’s contribution is largely due to the subtle changes in his vision. Initially, blockchain-based contracts (holding digital assets and transferring assets according to preset rules) regarded Ethereum as a platform for building programmable currencies, and then Developed to a general-purpose computing platform. It all started with subtle changes in focus and terminology. Later, with the increasing emphasis on “Web 3”, this influence became stronger. The latter regarded Ethereum as part of a set of decentralized technologies. The other two It is Whisper and Swarm.
In the trinity architecture, the relationship between Ethereum, Whisper and Swarm
In the original idea, Ethereum is a trinity. The world computer consists of three parts: calculation, storage and communication. Ethereum assumes the role of computing, and Whisper and Swarm provide storage and communication functions respectively. In Swarm’s latest introduction, Swarm includes storage and communication at the same time.
Swarm started the project in 2015, was first funded by the Ethereum Foundation, and later spun off and became an independent organization. Swarm completed $6 million in financing in February this year, and investment institutions include KR1, HashKey, NGC Ventures, etc. In its financing announcement, it disclosed that there are 32 core team members, divided into 8 groups: Leet Squad, Bee team, Bee-JS team, Comms, HR, DevOps, Ops and Knowledge Management.
How does Swarm work?
Expensive computing resources on Ethereum are destined to be unable to store data on a large scale, but storage is an indispensable element for decentralized applications to reach the masses. As one of the original members of the Ethereum ecosystem, Swarm’s main purpose is to provide decentralized storage services for DApp code, user data, and on-chain data in the ecosystem.
In the early days when Swarm was proposed, IPFS had not yet come out, and Bittorrent was the most popular distributed file storage protocol on the Internet at that time. However, the obvious problem with Bittorrent is the lack of incentives and the lack of motivation for users to share files for free. How to design a system to achieve stable and durable, decentralized data storage and exchange? The blockchain just provides an incentive idea, and Swarm chooses to implement the incentive mechanism through smart contracts.
The Swarm incentive system is built around three important contract components: Swap (exchange), Swear (guarantee), and Swindle (fraud). Its operating mechanism is as follows:
- Swap: The exchange contract records bandwidth usage, compensates nodes that provide content services, and promotes the wider dissemination of popular content and faster acquisition.
- Swear: Ensure that the contract handles long-term storage. While allowing nodes to sell their storage space, it also allows users to store data reliably for a long time on Swarm.
- Swindle: The fraud contract consists of a litigation engine that resolves disputes. It is a candidate for state ruling in the system.
Through three key smart contracts, Swarm provides a solution to track responsibility. Storers are responsible for specific content, while Swarm uses smart contracts to process node deposit payments and retains mandatory measures as a deterrent against fraud . Logically speaking, Swarm provides basic conditions for ecological users to freely exchange data value.
Token economy
Swarm’s native token symbol is BZZ. BZZ is a functional token and is also used for bandwidth and storage rewards. The initial circulation of BZZ is 62.5 million (note: not necessarily the final total amount of tokens).
The initial token distribution plan is as follows:
- Early token sales and public offering: 50%
- Team: 20%
- Foundation: 7%
- Ecological funding: 20%
Swarm has published less information about the economic model. The specific application method of BZZ in the ecosystem and the mining rules after the mainnet launch is currently unclear.
Testnet airdrop
The testnet airdrop program launched by Swarm in February of this year will airdrop 1 million BZZ tokens to Bee nodes participating in the testnet to reward early adopters and stress test the network. In view of the wealth effect of Filecoin and Chia in the initial stage of launch, Swarm, which is also highly expected, has attracted a large number of community users to participate, and there are currently more than 240,000 test nodes.
Swarm said that before the end of the test, the network will identify 35 trusted nodes as “queen nodes” (qBZZ nodes), and nodes that have exchanged bandwidth with these 35 queen nodes can get empty investment grids. The number of BZZ tokens sent by the airdrop is exactly 1 million, and the final distribution amount of a single node is determined according to the value of the node’s qBZZ check.
CoinList token sale
After completing a round of private equity financing at the beginning of the year, Swarm soon launched a public token sale. The Swarm public offering will be launched on CoinList at 1:00 on June 15th, Beijing time. The public offering will provide two methods, the price is 1.92 US dollars, the tokens will be unlocked around August 2, 2021.
The first method is conducted from 1:00 on June 15, 2021, Beijing time to 12:59 on June 15, 2021. The user purchases a minimum of US$100 and a maximum of US$500; the second method is on June 16, 2021, Beijing time. From 1:00 on the day to 12:59 on June 17, 2021, the minimum purchase of the user is 100 USD and the maximum is 10,000 USD. When the tokens sold in the first way are surplus, the second way of selling will be opened.
The prospects are bright, but there are also obvious problems
As the “pro son” of Ethereum, Swarm has not only won the support and brand effect of the star team, but more importantly, its unique advantages of integrating with the Ethereum ecosystem. Relying on the powerful network effect of Ethereum, if Swarm successfully attracts DApps in the Ethereum ecosystem to use its decentralized storage services, its development prospects are not difficult to imagine.
At the same time, Swarm also attaches great importance to its ecological construction. In 2020, it launched the ecological project funding plan, and currently supports 26 projects.
However, Swarm also has some obvious problems. Including slow progress in engineering and unclear economic models.
Swarm was launched in 2015 and has been silent for the first few years. It was not until June last year that a series of actions were launched, the white paper “The Book of Swarm” was released and the network was launched. According to the project development route, Swarm has been in the research stage from 2015 to 2020, which inevitably makes people doubt the true qualifications and engineering advancement capabilities of the project. In contrast, from 2017 to the launch of Filecoin last year, the engineering action is much faster, and from the perspective of mechanism design, Filecoin is more complex than Swarm.
The unclear economic model is also an urgent problem to be solved. From the Swarm white paper and public information, the clear positioning of BZZ in the network has not yet been found. How to capture the value of BZZ tokens? In addition, the mining mechanism has not yet been announced, and the mining part is not included in the token distribution plan, which may mean that the network will motivate miners through additional issuance. The importance of the economic model to the project is self-evident, but Swarm has not released relevant specific information before it goes live.
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