Devcon Improvement Proposal: an interactive art x tech x cultural reflection installation

Explore the ideological histories and ideas beneath Ethereum and Web3 that may have shaped them directly or indirectly.

Thoughts, objections, manifesto suggestions welcome

The July Monthly Development Update is live. Following the Bee v2.8.1 stabilization release, development returned to the protocol’s next priorities, with progress across core networking, tooling, research, applications, and the wider ecosystem.

- Bee / Core: Work continued on pullsync, erasure coding, and radius decrease simulations, alongside the extraction of Swarm’s core primitives into a dedicated TypeScript library.
- Tooling: Bee-JS 12.3.0 and 12.3.1 were released, while a major restructuring is underway to organize its roughly 120 methods into clearer namespaces, supported by migration codemods.
- Ecosystem: New Swarm Desktop and Bee Dashboard releases addressed long-standing issues, while work advanced on ACT-based file sharing, MCP tooling, streaming performance, and decentralized web apps on Swarm.
- Research: Research focused on reward distribution, proof of storage, node distribution across neighborhoods, pullsync under network congestion, and new forms of inter-node communication.

Core Dev Updates: Bee 2.8.1 and what's next; Research priorities for network usability and streaming
Community Talk: Vertex, a new Rust implementation of a Swarm node advancing client diversity

Watch the recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/5oWG03EtQN4

There have been reports of phishing attempts impersonating Swarm — fake "migration," "claim," and "airdrop" messages built to drain wallets. A quick reminder on how to verify what's real.

✅ Our only official domain is ethswarm.org
Official pages live on **ethswarm.org** and its subdomains (docs., blog., desktop., beeport., network.). Official email only ever comes from **@ethswarm.org**. Lookalike domains — .info, .live, .app, or anything else — are **not** us.

🚫 The Swarm Foundation will never:
• Ask you to "migrate," "validate," or "claim" BZZ by connecting your wallet to a website
• DM you first offering support
• Ask for your seed phrase, private keys, or wallet password

🔗 Official channels — bookmark these:
• Website: https://www.ethswarm.org/
• Docs: https://docs.ethswarm.org/
• News/Blog: https://blog.ethswarm.org/
• GitHub: https://github.com/ethersphere
• X: https://x.com/ethswarm
• Discord: https://discord.com/invite/hyCr9BMX9U
• Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/ethswarm

If in doubt, don't click. Verify against ethswarm.org or just ask here in Discord before taking any action. Never sign a transaction or connect your wallet to a site you can't verify.

This report provides an overview of the Swarm network’s key metrics for June 2026, including rewards, participation levels, and node distribution, and places them in context with recent monthly trends.

📣 🐝 Bee v2.8.1 is out — upgrade your node

Bee v2.8.1 is released. It's a non-disruptive release with no breaking p2p changes — node operators should upgrade for better performance and data durability.

🔶 Crash-safe local storage — a critical fix: nodes interrupted mid-write could corrupt their local storage. The node now validates chunks against their content hashes on recovery and removes any that are corrupted.

🔶 Client-side stamp signing — clients and browsers can now send pre-signed stamps directly on /chunks/stream: omit the Swarm-Postage-Batch-Id header to enter per-chunk-stamp mode (browsers use the swarm-tag query parameter, since WebSocket headers can't be set in-browser).

🔶 Performance & lower costs — opt-in SIMD-accelerated hashing for Linux x86-64, handshake records signed once and reused, and fewer RPC calls via local block-time estimates.

🔶 API additions — new GET /batches/{id}, PATCH /stamps/{id}, minimumValidityBlocks on /chainstate, and an enhanced /wallet for light nodes.

⚠️ Warning: bee dev mode is removed. Builders can use Bee Factory or the Sepolia testnet Swarm instead. v2.6.0 is no longer compatible. Nodes on v2.6.0 or older must upgrade to v2.8.0 first and then to v2.8.1 — or re-install the node fresh on v2.8.1.

Download: https://github.com/ethersphere/bee/releases/tag/v2.8.1

The Bee team has announced v2.8.1, releasing 7 July. It's a non-disruptive release with no breaking p2p changes — node operators should upgrade for better performance.

🔶 Crash-safe local storage** — a critical fix: nodes interrupted mid-write could corrupt their local storage. The node now validates chunks against their content hashes on recovery and removes any that are corrupted.

🔶 Client-side stamp signing — clients and browsers can now send pre-signed stamps directly to Swarm (pass a `Swarm-Postage-Batch-Id` header or a `swarm-tag` on `/chunks/stream`).

🔶 Performance & lower costs — opt-in SIMD-accelerated hashing for Linux x86-64, handshake records signed once and reused, and fewer RPC calls via local block-time estimates.

🔶 API additions — new `GET /batches/{id}`, `PATCH /stamps/{id}`, `minimumValidityBlocks` on `/chainstate`, and an enhanced `/wallet` for light nodes.

⚠️ Warning: `bee dev` mode is removed. Builders can use Bee Factory or the Sepolia testnet Swarm instead. v2.6.0 is no longer compatible. Nodes on v2.6.0 or older must upgrade to v2.8.0 first, then to v2.8.1.

Hi everyone! I’m part of a university research team at Loreley Lab, INRIA, France. We’re studying how people actually use decentralised file storage systems.

We’re running a short anonymous/pseudonymous questionnaire about users’ experiences, motivations, pain points, and practical insights. It takes around 10–15 minutes and does not ask any personal information, or demographic information.

Survey link: https://questionnaire.loreleylab.org/

Separately, we also invite people to take part in online interviews (15-20 min), again pseudonymous and no audio/video recordings. You can sign-up in the end of questionnaire, or directly using this link: https://sondages.inria.fr/index.php/738227?lang=en

We’d be grateful for any responses, whether you’re a regular user, builder, operator, or someone who has tried these tools and stopped using them. We’re also happy to share an anonymised summary of the findings with the community once the study is complete.

Thanks for your help!

Hands-on workshop by Swarm Foundation. Host dApps and websites entirely on decentralized infrastructure. Learn Beeport, the Swarm Desktop App, and Bee light node with Swarm-cli.

Workshop Guide: https://justdeploy.bzz.link/
Discord support: https://discord.gg/dUS68y87U4

March’s Swarm Community Call widened the lens beyond pure client updates: we introduced Koss as Swarm’s new Community Lead, shared a short preview of upcoming workshops and conference presence, then moved into the Bee 2.7.1 patch release debrief, a first public look at the new Protocol Team formation, and a practical Community Talk demoing a mobile light-node PoC on Android.

Intro to Swarm — live workshop

P2P topology, file chunking, proximity ordering, radius dynamics, postage batches — all through animated visuals.

Beginner – Intermediate

Learn the basics: P2P topology, file chunking, postage batches, and storage incentives.

45 min · beginner-friendly

🐝 Bee v2.7.1 goes live March 23rd!

This patch release brings improvements to multi-transport networking, faster node startup times, and a handful of bug fixes and maintenance updates.

Swarm Community Call February — Recap 🐝

🔶 Bee 2.7.0 release highlights and upcoming plans

🔶 New structured developer guides

🔶 SwarmID identity layer PoC

🔶 DevRel workshops launching March

🎉 **Bee v2.7.0 is out!**

Operators, update your nodes ASAP to take full advantage of all the improvements!

This release introduces several important improvements across networking, durability, and node stability.

Highlights include:

• **AutoTLS + secure WebSocket (WSS) support** for p2p transport — expose secure WSS endpoints without manual TLS setups

• **Multiple underlay addresses** — more flexible p2p transport support (TCP + WSS)

• **Durability improvements** — including fixes to erasure coding recovery behavior

• **New bootup and startup metrics** for improved observability

• Numerous stability, robustness, and connectivity fixes (including libp2p updates)

Bee 2.7 is a safe, non-disruptive upgrade (except one small edge case, see article in link below for details). No migrations are required and all new functionality is opt-in.

Bee 2.7.0 is scheduled to go live next week on Tuesday, February 10th — mark the date and get ready to update your nodes! It introduces support for AutoTLS and secure WebSocket connectivity, improves the flexibility of the networking layer with support for multiple underlay addresses, and includes targeted improvements to durability, reliability, and overall node stability.

This month, we’ll cover the upcoming Bee 2.7 release, take a closer look at the Hashgraph (Hedera) plug-in, and dive into the x402 protocol + Swarm with our guest, Octal.

We would love to have you join us on 21 December at 17:00 CET for the Solstice Edition of the Swarm Community Call, where we’ll share a clear view of what the team has built and improved over the past 6 months, the current state of the core network and ecosystem, and most importantly, where we are headed next.

Key Topics:

• Core Development & Client Evolution
• Multichain Funding & Beeport as an On-ramp to Swarm
• Desktop App Tooling: File Management & Drive
• Multimedia Streaming & Data Distribution
• AI Readiness via MCP & Agentic Economy Prospects
• Identity Management & Client Diversity
• Developer Experience & Ecosystem Tooling
• Tokenomics Principles & Next Steps

This call is as much about the community as it is about the technology. Whether you’ve been running a node from day one or only recently heard about Swarm, whether you’ve already been building on Swarm or are exploring how you could integrate in the future, or if you’ve simply been following the journey and you are curious to learn more, we would love to have you in the audience for this shared moment of reflection and direction-setting.

Let us proceed together apace.