Swarm, Ethereum’s Storage Network, Announces Mainnet Storage Incentives and Web3PC Inception

PRESS RELEASE. Swarm, the decentralised storage and communication system built on Ethereum, is announcing the mainnet release of its storage incentives programme, a mechanism to reward storage providers, which now incorporates staking.

Swarm has been in development for the past five years, having over $6 million in 2021 through a private funding round led by VCs such HashKey Capital, KR1, and NGC Ventures. Recently in September Swarm team published an updated network roadmap, and their native token BZZ reacted with a price increase up to 40%.

The storage incentive programme is open to the Swarm community and anyone willing to share spare storage space and an internet connection. Financial rewards, in the form of Swarm’s utility token (BZZ), will be distributed among storage operators in exchange for their participation.

Rewards are based on the price of renting storage, determined by market forces of supply and demand. Currently, the price of renting storage is fixed, but in the future an oracle system will be introduced to update prices automatically, further contributing to Swarm’s decentralisation.

Storage Incentives, Staking Introduction and node requirements

Staking has been introduced to enable participation in the redistribution mechanism. The mechanism used resembles Ethereum’s POS (Proof of Stake), where nodes are chosen to receive all network storage fees periodically. Storage rent fees will be updated in the following weeks up to more than 1000x from the current price point.

To become a node operator, a standard computer with 20GB of storage and a stable internet connection is required, the most accessible requirements in its class to empower decentralisation.

The Swarm network is already operational and the team expects the incentives mechanism to help the Swarm economy expand, with the network becoming fully self-sustainable while enforcing a healthy balance between storage operators and users.

Daniel Nagy, chief scientist and vice president for Swarm Foundation, commented: “Proper incentives for storing information and making it available upon request are what makes Swarm self-sustaining and viable in the long term, without subsidies or reliance on altruism”

WEB3PC – A personal “World Computer”

With Swarm, Ethereum’s initial idea of the “world computer” is being upgraded. A new brand of computers, a Web3PC that is private by design and respectful of the users’ right to use and produce content.

This new computer will communicate, store and provide services without leaking any private information. All data will completely belong to its rightful owners. Fairdrive, a Dropbox-like solution for file storage in Swarm, is already available, both as a desktop App and a component of the Web3PC.

Fairdrive allows individuals to easily use the Swarm network in a familiar Web 2.0 fashion. Plus, with its open source and interoperable design, developers can easily plug their dApps into Fairdrive, giving users a full Web3 experience from the comfort of their own computers. All the data created from using Fairdrive is stored following the simple rule: local first, Swarm second.

The team plans to have a working Web3 PC prototype out in the wild by June 2023.

About Swarm

Swarm is a decentralised data storage and distribution technology. It’s a base layer infrastructure for Web3 on which developers can create, host, and store dApps and all their accompanying data, NFT meta-data, and media files. It’s an open-source, p2p network that respects the privacy of it users’ data and secures it by default.

The Swarm protocol shares similarities with P2P (peer-to-peer) storage networks like BitTorrent but stands out with its integrated economic incentives, which enable permissionless storage and greater resistance to censorship.

A structural difference is the storage contract. With other popular decentralised storage solutions it is made with the storer, suitable for private data only. In Swarm, due to its architecture, such a deal is made with the network, delivering the permissionless property and making it suitable for both private and public data.

Swarm aims to serve as the serverless internet operating system for hosting and running dApps (decentralised applications).

Learn more by visiting www.ethswarm.org

Contact
pr@ethswarm.org

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