Swarm and Ethereum Classic Labs Announce Collaboration to Support the Swarm Alpha and Beta Release

The Bees have been released! In other words, the Swarm decentralized storage network has launched its alpha network. This announcement has been the culmination of a productive and collaborative partnership that started at Devcon. Ethereum Classic Labs is proud to have partnered with the Swarm team providing funding, project management, and development resources since October of 2019.

One of the blockchain’s fundamental growing pains is data-storage and this is a problem that needs to be solved to disrupt any real-world industry. Storing any serious amounts of data on Ethereum Classic can be expensive or even more expensive on Ethereum. Ethereum Classic, among other Ethereum-based blockchains, is designed to store transactions. It’s not feasible to imagine Ethereum Classic storing reviews, healthcare records, or HD video.

Traditionally, a server is rented from a centralized storage company and the data’s feasibility is only as feasible as the company you’re willing to trust. You’re also trusting that the company is securing your data. If verified Twitter accounts can get hacked, then what about all your Facebook data containing your affiliations, messages, and photos? Decentralized applications still have this problem because a lot of resources around a DApp are centralized from the website hosting, images, or other data-intensive resources that the user has to interact with. This is where the Swarm comes in.

“While we’re dedicated to accelerating the development of Ethereum Classic, we’re proud to put concrete support behind projects like Swarm, that deal with universal challenges in blockchain and are excited to continue to partner with and support Ethereum projects and teams. Overall, the blockchain technology is relatively new and the need for storage and storage-specific solutions is universal, and something we’re only going to solve through collaboration. The ecosystem as a whole needs multiple people working on this from different angles. Swarm has an incredible community, has been interoperable from the beginning, and shares our commitment to multi-chain support,” said James Wo, Founder and Chairman of ETC Labs.

Swarm is a decentralized peer-to-peer storage network. Unlike traditional data-storage, when a file is uploaded, it’s submitted as a transaction and given a unique hash. This data is stored on individual user’s storage devices across the Swarm network much like IPFS or BitTorrent. However, Swarm is being built with interoperability with Ethereum-based blockchain in mind and will have an incentive mechanism to ensure economic feasibility.

“For a decentralized solution, the most important ingredient is to have economic incentives. Swarm took an ambitious goal of solving for decentralized storage and we have a strong solution for messaging. It aspires to provide the whole set of primitives that define web stack to be a decentralized application,” said Viktor Tron, Swarm Team Lead.

The design principles guiding Swarm are to be:

• stable
• scalable
• secure
• self-sustaining

A detailed description of the design and architecture of Swarm can be found in the Book of Swarm and on Swarm’s architecture page.

The Swarm alpha release is a significant milestone for the Swarm team having graduated from the Ethereum Foundation. As Swarm is pursuing a beta release, developers and node operators can start using and participating in the Swarm network by operating a Bee client, the protocol providing node software for Swarm, and interfacing with the Swarm network using the service’s API. Visit the Swarm documentation to get started.

To hear more from Viktor Tron, Team Lead of the Swarm project, check out his interview on the EVM61 Podcast with ETC Core’s, Stevan Lohja.

About Swarm

Swarm is a distributed storage platform and content distribution service, a native base layer service of the Ethereum web3 stack that aims to provide a decentralized and redundant store for DApp code, user data, blockchain and state data. Swarm sets out to provide various base layer services for web3, including node-to-node messaging, media streaming, decentralized database services and scalable state-channel infrastructure for decentralized service economies. For more information visit, https://swarm.ethereum.org/.

About Ethereum Classic Labs (ETC Labs)

The mission of ETC Labs is to build relevant, accessible, and high-quality technology, to create communities of value in a mature and regulated ecosystem. Our goal is to fulfill the promise of blockchain to improve people’s lives using the Ethereum Classic technology, one of the world’s major public blockchains. The ETC Labs team of experts fosters partnerships with organizations and institutions in order to address fundamental challenges in developing and deploying this innovative technology. We fulfill the mission in three ways: The ETC Labs Accelerator, which invests in up to 25 blockchain projects annually that contribute to sustaining a robust ecosystem; strategic investments in innovative projects focused on economic and social development; and the ETC Core, a team of experts and developers who maintain the Ethereum Classic blockchain and build key applications, solutions, and tools. For more information visit, https://etclabs.org/.

For press inquiries contact, kelsey.r@etclabs.org

Swarm and Ethereum Classic Labs Announce Collaboration to Support the Swarm Alpha and Beta Release was originally published in Ethereum Classic Labs on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.