The State Of Ethereum Swarm - Angela Vitzthum

hello can you guys hear me okay awesome how's everybody doing great um so my name is angela and to hello everyone here physically and to those that are streaming um i work as a product owner for the swarm organization and my primary focus is on the fair drive dap but today i'm going to play proxy and fill you in on the what the entire swarm organization has been working on so what you can expect for the next few moments are updates including milestones we'll be talking a little bit about fair drive and then we're going to end things with a few really cool announcements so without further ado let's kick things off for those that may not be familiar swarm is a system of peer-to-peer you sorry better we're gonna try this okay all right so for those that may not be familiar swarm is a system of peer-to-peer networked nodes that create a decentralized storage and communication service the system is economically self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system enforced through smart contracts on the ethereum blockchain swarm's longer-term vision is to become the operating system of re-decentralized internet it provides a scalable and self-sustaining infrastructure for a supply chain economy of data and before i dive into the product updates i did want to peel the cover back on who we're considering when we work through our solutions so our vision and what we're building needs to support a variety of user types i'm sure that's not shocking to anyone we want to be robust in our use cases and thoughtful on our approach based on participants on our network so for instance we want our end users to have a smooth experience starting a node and have tools to monitor and interact with their local node this experience and toolkit would be different from what adapt developer would be looking for and we want to equip dapp developers with the mature tool kit that allows them to integrate swarm in their web 3d app and then we have operators who set up nodes and are incentivized to contribute their bandwidth in storage and then collaborators are alternative client development efforts that utilize our protocols and apis and then last we have our community where our aim is to encourage autonomous independent and permissionless communities to take further ownership over the protocol and its usages so all these user types come together to form the foundation of swarm and so you may be asking or not um what are we doing you know to support you and so i want to talk about milestone one which we had just accomplished and this coincided with the winter solstice and our milestone was to host unstoppable and immutable content on swarm so said differently we wanted to allow users to upload and download content such as website or even nft metadata that is optimized and more importantly reliable so this body of work is implemented across all the swarm products so b gateway swarm cli chrome extension dashboard and last but certainly not least bjs okay so cool but what does that really mean the network is reliable enough to store websites so for instance this is really cool our own site utilizes our own network and you can find it at swarm.bzz.link files folders and websites can be uploaded and downloaded and you can use your own ens domain or generated name as subdomain with a bzz.link and your website or friend and app will work just as it would as if it were served by a normal web 2 content hosting service um you can use feeds to update content off-chain so no on-chain transaction cost this is definitely more of a beta feature but i did want to address it because we love to see it and so what we've achieved with this milestone and what we can offer are permissionless upload and download a robust defense against blocking or changing access to content once published integrity of protected content and last eventually forgetting or signaling to the network to delete content that is no longer relevant to preserve so now that we have an understanding of what the milestone one entails i wanted to share some results so obviously we need a way to measure if we're successful or not so going into this milestone the following was established as a means of success metrics small data and dapps so approximately like five megabytes can be uploaded and downloaded reliably certainly larger files are possible um and we're testing that limit daily but i do want to stress like the reliability of it so we're going to continue to grow in that respect and i just wanted to acknowledge the average download speeds on here as well they are a bit slower than what we would expect of the normal internet but there's a lot going on in swarm to satisfy the security and availability guarantees and these are just initial retrievals from the network without any caching so keep a lookout for a blog post coming out from us to further highlight the state of the network um in building upon the success of milestone two we've started our efforts for our successive milestone one we've started our efforts for milestone two so taking a look at the milestone 2 uh this is setting up and interacting with the b node and optimizing it for ease of use so in a nutshell we really want for any crypto enthusiast with an interest in swarm to be able to set up and run a b node easily as it stands today it's not the least cumbersome task for a user so you may be asking how are we going to go about fixing this so we're currently working on a desktop app with the ui for basic uh operations that you can install without any registration or blockchain interaction and here's how that would work uh it will first run as an ultralight node meaning that you can access and or download the data but not upload so our milestone one accomplishment of uploading and downloading files and folders and websites is leveraged to create this ultra light node and essentially the user would have to complete a crypto onboarding to fund their node in order to unlock the uploading functionality the user again would need to fund their node so after that we have our light node and uploading sorry after that we have our light node and therefore uploading is possible but does not enable data storage for others and milestone 2 is directly aimed at simplifying the process so it can be done in less than 30 minutes so that's sort of our benchmark is that 30 minute mark and this would be for mac windows linux on both mainnet and testnet um we don't really have a great data point today on average how long it takes to set up a v-node i mean if i had to guess i'd say anywhere from like an hour to half a day but regardless it's just absolutely not good enough and we're gonna do something about that here in milestone two and in addition to optimizing the b nodes we're working on improving the documentation so that node operators are up and running in less than 30 minutes as well this means we're simplifying and documenting the operations of our gateway so that everyone can do it easily and the overall value to optimizing here is so that we can attract a larger audience so obviously the easier it is to set up a b node the more that will be set up in turn results in a stronger network because it will be much more decentralized with more diverse users and node operators and this allows more people to be able to publish and access content through this gateway setup developers and communities can easily access the swarm network um so then looking into the future i just wanted to quickly go over milestones three and four for the benchmarks that we'll be focusing on and so these are node operators are directly rewarded for contributing their storage space basically the holy grail of decentralized storage if you will and optimizing for larger data uploads you can view the most up-to-date information on the swarm milestones at the url on the screen here so it's progress.eswarm.

org and that will have our most up-to-date milestone information to switch gears a little bit i would like to kick things over to fair drive so fair drive i love fair drive so where innovation interoperability and decentralization unite in the name of fair data fair drive is a community driven initiative started by swarm with the mission to empower freedom and enable data interoperability on the dap level so by enabling decentralized storage developers can create and build interoperable decentralized and open-sourced apps so that users can reclaim their privacy own their data and control their digital identity so welcome to fair drive a personal data store built on top of ethereum swarm fair drive is your digital safe space that's controlled by you a depth that consists of a typical drive interface with files and folders and a bzz wallet to manage token balances and key pairs so under the hood an engine is running a file system on top of ethereum swarm so if we were to create like a little fair drive sandwich it can consist of fair drive the dap which um creates the ui layer and then we have the fair data protocol that's used to communicate with fair os that sits on top of swarm so a lot of work has been done on fair drive over the past few months and what you're seeing here is a screenshot of this step we have done everything from code refactoring to feature optimization and definitely improved usability so for a quick recap on what all that entailed we have a new look and feel and a more intuitive experience and if you're unfamiliar with how fair drive used to look i would say it was kind of like a dark hole and i say that with love but it truly was like if you can picture it a terminal window so this is a vast improvement um a few other things that we've done in terms of optimization is adding robustness to the drive portion in a few key areas so you can now upload and download files stored in your fare drive in addition to deleting files any pot or file can be shared and displayed in a friend's fare drive by selecting the file in pod copying the generated hash and then a user can easily toggle back and forth to see which files are there and which files they have that are shared and then we've also implemented searching and sorting it's gotten a lot easier and we give you five common options on how you want your files sorted drive now supports uploading a csv directly into the pod's key value store this allows for queries of the data inside which can be a really powerful tool and then we've also implemented a native consense viewer that allows users to open up consent receipts within fair drive so in addition to the drive portion we have an explore section as well and this is kind of what i call adapt marketplace but it's for the application developers that have created and built dapps that support the interoperability and decentralization so we support a few currently dracula which is a markdown editor we have another consense viewer and then we have a photo viewer as well and if anybody is interested we are actively looking for adapt developers to expand on our marketplace so i would really love to connect with anybody that has a project so please come find me and then we also have some exciting things in the work as we're looking ahead we're preparing the app for a private mainnet beta we've been working on a way to support nfts in fair drive so in the near future you'll be able to generate an nft based on the data you have stored in fair drive we're adding improved apps to our explore tab um including a new improved photo viewer and then last we'll be incorporating some additional um like common folders so today a consent folder is automatically added to your fare drive when you create an account we'll be looking to expand upon that in the future and then other things that are on our radar are definitely seamless login and then again continuing to add dapps to our marketplace one last thing that i'd like to note before switching gears off of fair drive is that the fair drive development will follow the development of the fair data protocol so for interoperability with different storage um different data storage backends all right wait i didn't want to go into this slide just yet so i'm really excited about this i got to take a deep breath but um we're going to give you guys a little bit of alpha here so just to reiterate this is alpha but i and i hesitated to share but again it's too good we're in the final stages of writing ferrous running in wasm this means client side fair os can interact with bees on local networks or over gateways so apps can use swarm storage as a directory or file system seamlessly and we've reduced the size of binary from 14 megabytes to 3.5 for wasm assembly and have near native speeds for encryption and chunking so imagine the development opportunities like seriously it's really really cool um and then i do have one last another exciting announcement as well we're going to be hosting an event so from march 1st through 21st artists gamers developers activists crypto and non-crypto people people are going to come together in the second fair data society festival and hackathon organized by swarman partners so this event is known as we are millions or wham and it will explore the power of art blockchain and games to create a fair and ethical private censorship free permissionless and unstoppable web 3. we'll be experimenting with game mechanics and nfts to see how they can enable playful collaboration there will be worthless nft drops that will hopefully make the experience priceless and soul bound expect resistance the game and nfts will make the hackathon fun and exciting and will be experimenting with dows and how they can facilitate collaboration the following tracks will be addressed that you see on the screen art music activism privacy dow dapps web3 liberate data game development and so much more so if this sounds like your jam please please please take a moment to register at the url and we'll see you in the metaverse so that felt like a lot i probably talked really fast um but before i sprint off stage i just wanted to make sure that you guys knew how to get in contact with us if you have any questions or want to get involved you can hit us at any of those links above and we definitely are hiring so if you guys are looking to get into this space or have some experience i'd love to chat as well