Swarm-The latest research report on distributed storage projects (must be collected)

1. Why do we need distributed storage?

At present, the simplicity and low maintenance of cloud storage have led to the large-scale migration of data to centralized servers. A few Internet giants (such as Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Google, etc.) control the complete data of massive users, but people have no control over their own data.

The Swarm core team has 32 employees and has established the Swarm Association in Switzerland. In addition to the financial support from the Ethereum Fund, they have also reached a cooperation with Bitcoin Suisse to obtain sufficient funds and have their own funding sources. In the past year, the project has reorganized the team several times and now finally has 8 well-organized sub-teams: Leet Squad, Bee Team, Bee-JS Team, Comms, HR, DevOps, Ops and Knowledge Management.

The concept and first expression of Swarm as one of the three pillars to achieve a decentralized network appeared before the launch of Ethereum in early 2015. Promoted by Ethereum founders Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, and Jeffrey Wilcke, Swarm's protocol tags bzz and shh were both coined by Vitalik.

Swarm’s scope and data integrity in 3 dimensions

From a developer's perspective, Swarm is best viewed as a public infrastructure that powers the real-time, interactive web applications familiar from the Web 2.0 era. It provides a low-level API for primitives that are the building blocks of complex applications, and provides the foundation for tools and libraries for the Web 3.0 development stack built on Swarm. The API and tools are designed to allow access to the Swarm network from any traditional web browser, so Swarm can immediately provide a private and decentralized alternative to today's World Wide Web (WWW).

Considering the design and architecture of Swarm’s system, we can think of Swarm as having clearly separable layers, with each layer depending on the previous layer (see the diagram above):

• Peer-to-peer network protocol, used as underlying transport,
• An overlay network with a protocol that provides support for distributed immutable storage of blocks (fixed-size chunks of data),
• Components that provide high-level data access and define APIs for base-level functionality,
• Define standard application tiers and outline best practices for more granular use cases.

From an end-user perspective, Swarm is not much different from the World Wide Web, except that uploaded resources are not hosted on a specific server, which makes users use Swarm in the same way as usual. Swarm provides a peer-to-peer storage and service solution that is DDos-resistant, zero-downtime, fault-tolerant, censorship-resistant, and self-sustaining, with a built-in incentive system that allows users to pay for traded resources through peer-to-peer accounting. Swarm aims to be deeply integrated with Ethereum's DevP2P multi-protocol network layer and the Ethereum blockchain for domain name resolution (using ENS), service payments, and content availability guarantees. In order to resolve ENS domain names, Swarm nodes must be connected to the Ethereum blockchain (mainnet or testnet).

VI. Project Development Progress

In many ways, the project has matured, with Swarm 1.0 expected to be released in the second quarter of this year.

In 2020, the project team created a new Swarm network that exists in parallel with the "old" Swarm network. In addition, four Bee versions have been released, and Bee nodes have become more stable and modular, preparing for the launch of the Swarm 1.0 mainnet and beyond:

Swarm’s development progress is fully consistent with the Roadmap, all advanced features have been implemented and released, and Swarm 1.0 is expected to be officially released in the second quarter of 2021.

7. Competitive product analysis

In the field of distributed storage, in addition to Swarm, there are many projects actively promoting decentralized storage and the arrival of Web 3.0. To completely surpass the world of Web 2.0, there is still a problem that needs to be overcome: storing data on the blockchain is very expensive for very small amounts of things.

Both Bitcoin and Ethereum adopted the BitTorrent layout and ran with it, supplementing the architecture with transaction capabilities, but later did not consider storing non-system data. Among other projects, ZeroNet has successfully implemented a simple BitTorrent data distribution method for web content distribution. However, due to the above-mentioned BitTorrent issues, ZeroNet ultimately failed to support the responsiveness expected by web service users.

In an attempt to enable responsive, distributed web applications (or dapps), the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) has made its own significant improvements to BitTorrent. One standout feature is a highly compatible URL-based retrieval scheme for the web. In addition, the cataloging, indexing of available data (like BitTorrent organized as a DHT) has been greatly improved, making it possible to also search for small portions of any file. There are many other projects that are also actively exploring and providing valuable Web3.0 alternatives to the swarms of servers and services that Web2.0 developers have come to expect, providing a path to break away from the existing reliance on centralized architectures to enable data harvesters. These roles are not trivial, and even the simplest web applications today contain a very large number of concepts and paradigms that must be remapped into the trustless setting of Web3.0. It turns out that in many ways, the problem may even be more nuanced than implementing trustless computation in a blockchain. Swarm responds to this with a series of carefully designed data structures that allow application developers to recreate the concepts we have become accustomed to in Web2.0 in the new setting of Web3.0. Swarm successfully reimagines current web products and reimplements them on a solid cryptoeconomic foundation.

The most popular distributed storage project at present may be IPFS. Compared with Swarm, IPFS has a certain first-mover advantage in publicity and mainnet launch to a certain extent. Next, we hope to analyze the two projects, Swarm and IPFS, through a more comprehensive comparison.

Similarities between Swarm and IPFS:

Both Swarm and IPFS provide comprehensive solutions for the efficient decentralized storage layer of the next generation of the Internet. The high-level goals and technologies are very similar. Both Swarm and IPFS systems aspire to provide:

• A general decentralized distributed storage solution.
• Content Delivery Agreement.
  
  

Similarities between the two projects:

• Both IPFS and Swarm are completely open source, aspire to provide a layer of (monetary) incentives for participating nodes, encourage healthy operations and/or insurance/reinsurance :), and provide users with compensation for using their resources.

• Use some kind of block storage mode where larger documents can be shredded and those files can be ingested in parallel.

• Integrity protection is provided through content addressing (also applies to encrypted partial content).

• Both projects provide URL schemes and decentralized domain name resolution.

• Transparently and efficiently maps file system directories to sets of storage objects.

Therefore, both are in principle very suitable for replacing the data layer of the current broken Internet, and as the storage layer of the web3 vision (along with other similar attempts, especially zeronet, Maidsafe, i2p, storj, etc.), must have the characteristics of the usual distributed document storage, such as:

• Low latency retrieval.

• Efficient autoscaling (content caching).

• Reliable, fault-tolerant operation that is resistant to node disconnection and intermittent availability of redundant storage.

• Zero downtime.

• Reviewability.

• A potentially permanently versioned archive of content.

How are Swarm and IPFS different?

About Incentives

Filecoin is a sister project of IPFS that adds an incentive layer to IPFS and relies on its own altchain. Proof-of-Retrievability "mining" on the Filecoin blockchain is a scheme that provides ongoing compensation to storers for saving content. Random audits as part of the Proof-of-Work task are responded to by proofs of retrievability, and the winning miners are compensated accordingly. This system has inherent limitations: IP funds can only implement positive incentives and rely on collective responsibility.

Swarm leverages the power of smart contracts to process deposit payments for registered nodes. This allows for mandatory measures to be taken as a deterrent. Swarm provides a solution for tracking accountability, making storers solely responsible for specific content.

IPFS does not guarantee storage, while Swarm enforces content-agnostic behavior and provides content-specific security levels that are flexibly adjustable by users.

Swarm will implement efficient automated collective auditing of rarely accessed off-chain content, and conduct final litigation on the blockchain as part of content insurance (a key feature). Using a pairwise accounting protocol and delayed small off-chain payments, Swarm provides substantial transaction cost savings while maintaining security. IPFS+filecoin's reliance on competitive proof-of-custody mining means overuse of the blockchain and redundant use of resources inherent to normal operation.

Since pairwise accounting, deferred payments, and collective auditing are all off-chain, Swarm’s reliance on the blockchain is greatly reduced, limited to registration and final litigation.

Finally, Swarm's concept of "Manifests" (generic routing tables/key-value indexes with integrity protection) allows

• Modeling a hierarchical file system on the cloud
• Serverless servers with routing tables and metadata principle system (content type, encryption and security information, etc.)
• Implement arbitrary DHTs inside Swarm, so it can support "sidechains" or the db component of traditional webapps (like mysql in a LAMP stack, etc.)

In general, Swarm and IPFS are both very high-quality projects, providing comprehensive solutions for the efficient decentralized storage layer of the next generation of the Internet to solve many problems in today's Internet and data distribution and storage.

8. Token Economic Model

BZZ Token (The following Token model is compiled based on previous information and may be updated and adjusted. Please refer to the official announcement of Swarm):

BZZ Toke is Swarm’s utility token and is also used for bandwidth and storage rewards.

BZZ initial supply: 62.5M, minimum starting price (public offering expected before mainnet launch): 0.32DAI, liquidity provided by Curve platform.

Token Allocation:

• Fundraising: 50%

• Team: 20%

• Foundation: 7%

• Infrastructure Grants: 10%

• DApp Grants: 10%

• Donations: 3%

As an official part of the Ethereum project, Swarm has long been funded by the Ethereum Foundation (starting in 2015 and undergoing more than five years of intensive research). In addition, to ensure the smooth completion of Mainnet, Swarm has partnered with Bitcoin Suisse and completed a $6 million private placement with its help. It has sufficient funds to further expand the team and ensure that Swarm10 can be executed on time and released in the second quarter of this year.

Bitcoin Suisse, founded in 2013, is a pioneer and market leader in Swiss crypto finance and technology. Bitcoin Suisse has helped shape the cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem in Switzerland and has been a driving force in the development of "Crypto Valley" and "Crypto Nation Switzerland". As a regulated Swiss financial intermediary and licensed by Swiss and Liechtenstein Bank,

BitcoinSuisse provides prime brokerage, trading, custody, lending, staking and other crypto financial services to private and institutional clients. BitcoinSuisse has built a team of more than 200 experts in its Zug, Copenhagen-based office.

Currently, Swarm has obtained ALPHEMY

CAPITAL、bitscale capital、DFG、KR1、

Currently, Swarm has obtained ALPHEMY

Investments from many well-known institutions including CAPITAL, bitscale capital, DFG, KR1, HASHKEY, NGC Venture, Lede Capital, P2P CAPITAL, Waterdrip Capital, White Paper Capital and YBB Foundation LTD.

Appendix: Swarm Monthly Development Progress Update - (April 2021) Chinese version

Bee Tracking Progress

The following features are supported:

1. Postage stamps

2. Light nodes

3. File/manifest redefinition

4. Pinning CRUD API

The community held a meeting for the demonstration.

Beginning to collaborate more broadly with the Discord community to test bee's 0.6.0 testing version (unofficial release) (#bee-testing-0-6-0).

Implemented various features to improve the stability of the network.

DevOps Tracking

JS Tracking

A new version of Bee-js Javascript client library (v0.8.1) has been released. Summary of releases since the last update:

1.) Added missing Bee API endpoints

2.) Improved signer interface and Ethereum wallet support

3.) Easier handling of binary and JSON data

4.) BigInt supports money-related APIs

Released version 0.1.0 of Bee Dashboard (formerly Bee Status UI). You can read more about it in our Medium post

information.

Research Direction

A method combining time-based settlement with monetary settlement was established.

A breakthrough in simplifying secure stamping (i.e. earning active storage rewards through a mining algorithm) will lead to the implementation of Sybil-resistant node addressing after version 1.0.

The future is unknown, and humanity will still face many challenges. In today's digital society, it is certain that to become sovereign and control our destiny, both nations and individuals must retain access to and control over their data and communications. Swarm's vision and goals come from the decentralized technology community and its values, as Swarm may become ubiquitous in future society.