Announcing Swarm Proof-of-Concept Release 3
Swarm Proof-of-Concept Release 3: A Major Milestone in Decentralized Storage and Content Distribution
The Swarm team is thrilled to announce the immediate release of Swarm client v0.3, the third proof-of-concept release (POC3) of the Ethereum Swarm client. This milestone marks a significant step forward in the development of a decentralized storage and content distribution system that is fault-tolerant, has zero downtime, and offers censorship resistance.
A Year of Progress
It's been a year and a half since the first release of the POC2 series was deployed, and the Swarm project launched its public alpha network. In that time, the Swarm team has grown in size and is now on fire, delivering the vision of a decentralized internet. The team has been busy redesigning the network layer, rewriting the retrieval protocol using a stream abstraction, rewriting connectivity management and the overlay network code, and developing a sophisticated network simulation framework to test algorithmic correctness, scalability, and fault tolerance of various subsystems.
Swarm 0.3: A Decentralized Storage and Content Distribution System
Swarm content storage is more than just "bittorrent on steroids." The technical details can be found in the chapter on architecture in the new and improved Swarm guide. At its core, Swarm is a service that provides APIs to upload and download content to the cloud and through URL-based addressing offers virtual hosting of websites and decentralized applications (dapps) without webservers, using decentralized peer-to-peer distributed infrastructure.
New and Experimental Features in POC3
The POC3 release includes some new and experimental features that showcase the potential of Swarm:
PSS: A Messaging Protocol with Strong Privacy Features
PSS combines Swarm routing (bzz) with the Whisper (shh) encrypted message format (bzz+shh=pss). This messaging infrastructure can be the foundation of a whole new system of internode communication services, hence, can be referred to as Postal Service over Swarm.
Mutability: Easy Access to Changing Content
Swarm integrates with the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) on the Ethereum blockchain, allowing users to reference Swarm content by names like bzz://theswarm.eth. This is what allows us to reference Swarm content by names like bzz://theswarm.eth.
FUSE Support: Integrating Swarm Data into Local File Systems
FUSE enables users to integrate Swarm data directly into their local file systems (only on Linux and Mac). Using this system, users can "mount a Swarm manifest" as if it were a regular directory. It supports file system read and write operations, in which all content is automatically synced with the Swarm.
Encryption Support: Secure Uploads of Private Data
Swarm 0.3 comes with built-in encryption allowing for secure uploads of private data. The way encryption works users can upload a directory privately and still "share" a subdirectory with specific peers.
The Year Ahead
The year ahead will be both exciting and challenging. As part of the POC3 series, we are planning to switch on a revamped SWAP accounting system (Swarm 0.3.1) and enable "light" Swarm nodes (Swarm 0.3.2). Implementing erasure coding, proof of custody, insurance are also on the roadmap. We are on target delivering Swarm POC4 (production beta prerelease) in 2019.
Building a Community
We keep on building a community with our allies who champion the values of web3 and actively collaborate through working groups, building the foundational infrastructure, the backbone of second-layer services such as databases (http://wolk.com), private data management (http://datafund.io), rights and creative works licensing (http://jaak.io), decentralized version control (ethergit, http://epiclabs.io), video transcoding and streaming service (http://livepeer.org), communication and collaboration (https://mainframe.com) and the list is growing.
Contact Us
We welcome your feedback and contribution. Come find us in our gitter channel or our github repository.
Conclusion
Swarm Proof-of-Concept Release 3 marks a significant milestone in the development of a decentralized storage and content distribution system. With its new and experimental features, Swarm is poised to revolutionize the way we store and share data. We invite you to join us on this journey and contribute to the development of a decentralized internet.
Source: https://blog.ethereum.org/en/2018/06/21/announcing-swarm-proof-of-concept-release-3
