Gate.io AMA with Swarm-A Decentralised Data Storage and Distribution Technology

Time: Mar 23rd, 2023, 13:00 UTC
Gate.io hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with Gregor Žavcer,Director of the Swarm Foundation in the Gate.io Exchange Community.
Official Website: https://www.ethswarm.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ethswarm
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Guest

Gregor Žavcer — Director of the Swarm Foundation
Have been exploring decentralised business models and p2p data before 2009. Joined the blockchain space in 2015, worked and advised on several data related projects in web3. Have been supporting Swarm since 2016, joined full time in 2019 when Swarm was graduating from Ethereum Foundation.

Q&A from Gate.io

Q1: “There is no web3 without storage”. Do you agree with the statement?

Gregor: Yes, completely. I’d even expand that there’s no web3 without decentralised storage, afterall where should all the assets be stored?

To enable ownership in web3, storage is essential. Data and information must be stored in a decentralized manner, which means that no single entity can control it.

This is how Swarm also started, to complete the Ethereum world computer. Today, this is even more important.

Antonio: Where are my crypto kitties going to be stored? Real ownership and privacy of assets is crucial. Not even the nodes hosting the information have to be able to cut data off.

Q2: How does Ethereum tackle the issue of storage?

Gregor: It was clear from the very beginning that on-chain communications and on-chain storage were going to be expensive; the Ethereum blockchain was never meant to store data.

However, solutions beyond storing transaction history are very much needed for the web3 future.

Swarm is the tool that was envisioned to solve the challenge of storage. Swarm was always meant as the world’s hard drive to complement blockchain.

So, in a way, Swarm continues where blockchain ends when it comes to private or big data.

Antonio: Bitcoin + BitTorrent = Swarm.

Q3: Swarm has come a long way until today. What are its strengths compared to other storage solutions?

Gregor: Swarm’s architecture and design makes it the most decentralised storage of them all.

On Swarm, data uploaders make “a contract” with the network, not with a particular store.
This means it is stronger for censorship-resistance.

Additionally, Swarm’s “upload & disappear” feature, meaning that one does not need to run a node to store data on the network, has also opened a way for very private communication protocols.

Together, this creates a very powerful combination, an unstoppable network with very strong privacy properties. We’d like to see it as infrastructure for a self-sovereign digital society.

Antonio: I would say that the hardware requirements to run a node are very minimal compared to other solutions: a Raspberry Pi could be enough.

And as I mentioned earlier, not even the nodes storing the data are able to censor or cancel it. They can’t reconstruct or know what they are storing, because they store ‘confetti’ of the data. Yet, they got paid.

Q4: Can you tell us what is happening at Swarm right now?

Gregor: In short, we’re ready now.

After years of research and iterations, Swarm has finally cracked permissionless decetralised persistence guarantees.

Along with this, in February there was a price calibration of the network and we reached the important milestone of Swarm becoming an economically self-sufficient network.

In other words, node operators are now rewarded and running a node has become profitable. We see new nodes joining the network, and ofc, also new uploads.

Recently, the first milestone of uploading Wikipedia to Swarm was completed. Atm, search is being worked on, and other public good datasets are finding it’s way, like OpenStreetMaps and many more.

There’s still a lot to do but already now, dapp developers can also develop dapps quickly, especially by using layer 2 tooling such as Fairdrive as a data wallet, fairOS for decentralised backend and others.

If Swarm would be a car, now is the time to take a ride.

Q5: How will the future for Swarm look like?

Gregor: We’re just starting. We expect the network to become stronger with more nodes joining, and we expect there will be a lot more common good data available, for users and developers. Our tech roadmap has the next milestone set for support for big files, then we proceed to making possible that Decentralised service networks will run on top of Swarm.
Think of Airbnb, Uber,… without middlemen where anybody could eventually create it by just writing a de_script_ion of the service.

We are also looking a lot at how Swarm can help with the problems of data availability - where do rollups store data.

Antonio: It is pretty exciting. The promise of unstoppable storage means a lot to the web3 ecosystem, because data is everything. You would be able to securely and privately store your data, create public repositories that could be used by communities for public good.

Host applications that won’t be able to be shut down. And of course, all types of blockchain data. Swarm is particularly well positioned to become a player in the Data Availability ecosystem, the place where rollups will store the data.

Once the rollups create their magic, paired with Swarm dapps will be unstoppable. I can’t wait.