Demystifying Swarm: A censorship-resistant digital infrastructure

Swarm is a decentralized network of nodes that can store and exchange data with censorship-resistance at its core. It is open, neutral, borderless, secure and private with zero-downtime. Last but not least, it’s free.

Swarm can be used by any application to decrease dependency on centralized repositories.

Storing large files is not feasible on Ethereum blockchain because of the high gas cost (transaction fees) associated. This is where Swarm comes in. It gives you the ability to store files linking to your dApp.

Is Swarm analogous to IPFS and BitTorrent?

Swarm and IPFS are good at delivering low chunks of data with low latency, unlike BitTorrent, which is good at delivering large chunks of data at high throughput and high latency.

Swarm and IPFS take separate routes to reach similar goals. Swarm’s core idea is to deeply integrate with Ethereum and strongly believes in “No strings attached” when it comes to censorship-resistance in communication.

Let’s have a look at differences between Swarm and IPFS as both aim to serve the web3.

(A) Community and beliefs

• Swarm is native to Ethereum blockchain and backed by Ethereum communities. IPFS is not designed for special purpose blockchain and is the sister project of Filecoin
• Swarm incentives are built-in with Ethereum, while IPFS uses filecoin, a planned incentive as an altcoin
• Swarm community is growing at a rapid pace as new POCs have developed while IPFS community is still larger with existing real-world business solutions
• Swarm is a strong believer in censorship-resistance, IPFS, a believer in wider adoption by providing censorship tools voluntarily

(B) Technicalities and solutions

1. Swarm uses Ethereum devp2p protocol, and IPFS uses libp2p protocol

2. Swarm is content addressed chunks archive while IPFS is content addressed DHT (Distributed Hash Table). Swarm’s rigid use of an immutable content address chunk-store is a major design feature, which together with devp2p gives Swarm ability to solve problems efficiently, such as:

• Off-chain data integrity and pairwise accounting for incentives
• Auto-scaling and browsing privacy

Go ahead, explore!

If you are a developer, deploy, play and contribute as the code is open-source: https://github.com/ethersphere/swarm/

Keep your self updated for more exciting announcements on Swarm: https://swarm.ethereum.org/