Status / Swarm Mini Summit

Doug Leonard - Mainframe

The Mainframe team has leveraged Swarm mutable resources to provide fully decentralized, unstoppable mailboxing functionality. This will be demonstrated in an example chat dApp. This talk will walk you through our experience going from conception to implementation, describing briefly how swarm feeds work and how we applied them to the needs of our messaging dApp.

Biography - Doug Leonard

Doug breeds cryptokitties, loves blockchain tech, entrepreneurship and software engineering. He has been working as a full-stack engineer for over five years, with experience in mobile development, distributed systems and information security. Doug runs a podcast with his wife that focuses on married entrepreneurs. He has a Masters in Information Systems from Brigham Young University.

Felfoldi Zsolt - EF

The Ethereum ecosystem already has multiple specialized protocols designed to serve a tightly defined purpose. Multiple development teams bring new ideas to this scene every day which lead to diverging implementations and protocol specs. This competitive evolutionary process ensures long-term progress but it also makes cooperation more challenging. Ethereum and the EVM facilitate a cooperative evolutionary process in blockchain application development by providing a virtualization layer. Through the example of LES (the Geth light client protocol), this talk shows how this approach can take us even further at the p2p protocol level. The growing blockchain size and increased performace demands, the scalability efforts require more and more sophisticated protocols and network topologies. A well-chosen virtualization layer can provide compatibility between platforms, implementations and similarly purposed protocols while also making the development of new features easier.

Rodney Witcher - Wolk

Wolk has developed a set of code-complete deep blockchain services: Layer 3 SQL + NoSQL chains anchored in a Layer 2 Plasma Chain, itself anchored in a Layer 1 Ethereum stack. L2 Plasma Chain has evolving states of Plasma Tokens and its child chains’ latest roots stored in Sparse Merkle Trees (SMT). NoSQL Chains have evolving state roots of keys and values stored in a SMT, wherein values are chunk hashes kept in Cloudstore. SQL Chains have evolving state roots of table root hashes and owner root hashes, wherein root hashes model all key database structures (owner, database, table, index, record chunks); SQL transactions utilize a SQLite3 Virtual Machine to execute opcode instructions that interface with a Remote Cloudstore. The Remote Cloudstore receives both chunks and minted blocks from these L3 NoSQL/SQL chains via SWARM+PSS GetChunk/SetChunk and resource update interfaces, (that, in turn, interact with SWARM, a L2 Plasma Chain, or L1 Wolk Cloudstore, see below). All chains utilize abstracted consensus interfaces (RAFT, POA) to mint blocks. Upon minting each block, the “minter” sends Anchor Transactions to the L2 Plasma Chain, wherein the L2 Plasma Blocks record usage of storage and bandwidth along with Anchor Roots to L1. Critically, each SQL and NoSQL transaction submitted to a L3 results in a “Deep Merkle Proof” wherein provenance is derived from multiple SMT proofs: (1) a NoSQL key or SQL owner/table key stored in a L3 SMT (2) a L3 block hash stored in a L2 SMT (3) a L2 block hash stored in a L1 Smart Contract. Immutability is derived from L2 and L1 and censorship-resistance supervenes on the chosen remote cloudstore. Wolk shall present a working demonstration of our L3 and L2 deep blockchains starting with a Plasma deposit on Rinkeby and share current throughput/latency results.

Rodney Witcher, Mayumi Matsumoto, Alina Chu, Michael Chung, Bruce Han, Anandarup Ray, Yaron Asher, and Sourabh Niyogi (Wolk).

Anton Evangelatov - EF

Observability means making a complex system as transparent as possible to those who operate it. In this talk we will explain how we approach observability and monitoring within Swarm, what systems and tools we use, and discuss how we utilise them to bring simplicity, transparency and visibility to our production and staging environments.

Biography - Anton Evangelatov

Anton Evangelatov is a software engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, specialising in distributed systems, currently working on the Swarm project and as Ethereum Foundation DevOps. Prior to joining the Ethereum Foundation, Anton worked at a number of startups across Switzerland and Austria.

Javier Peletier - Epic Labs

Swarm is a content-addressed network, so when you upload something, that content can be retrieved back by providing its hash. Therefore, to host a changing website on Swarm, you need to store the website’s hash in a ENS contract to have it resolve the name to that hash so users can find your content. Thus, every website update requires an ENS on-chain transaction.
This may be fine for websites or Dapps that don’t change often, but certainly not OK for most applications. What if we provided a way for cheaply and quickly update content and also allowed the users and Dapps themselves to create and update content dinamically? What sorts of applications would this enable?

Enter Swarm feeds

Swarm feeeds are a powerful but little-known feature that enables Dapp developers to write applications that allow users to find, update and retrieve content, proving ownership with a signature, but without having to resort to interacting with a smart contract. In this talk, we would like to introduce developers to this feature, how it works, strengths and weaknesses, its simple API and how to get started using feeds with the command line, via HTTP API and even directly in the browser!

Biography - Javier Peletier

Javier Peletier is the CTO and cofounder of Epic Labs, an innovation center in Spain specialized in the Media industry and Blockchain techologies.
At Epic Labs, he is currently leading the Ethergit project, aimed at providing tools to decentralize open source once and for all, while contributing to making Ethereum/Swarm more powerful. On the latter, he worked during this year to help improve Swarm MRUs and make them more accesible to the web developer and easier to consume.
Prior to Epic Labs, Javier worked at Akamai, the first Internet content-delivery network as Services Director and Engineering Director, learning how content moves over the Internet reliably and at scale, working with engineers all over the world and helping deliver global streaming events such as the World Cup.
Javier is one of those passionate engineers who has been in the computing world since he was 5 and learned to code in his 48K, 8-bit ZX-Spectrum and hooked on the Internet since 1995. He enjoys designing and building scalable architectures and systems with the best team of engineers. Lots of war stories and anecdotes to share!

Attila Gazso, Mark Vujevits

There are different ways how you can use Swarm from a mobile app. In this presentation will talk about the different options (Light Node, existing libraries, using gateways), including the trade-offs and the level of maturity of each of them.

Biography - Attila Gazso

Attila has a background working on fault-tolerant, distributed and decentralized systems for more than a decade., Recently his main interest is decentralized apps on mobile. He is a fan of open-source and functional programming.

Gregor Žavcer, Tadej Fius, Daniel Nickless

We live in a world where individuals are exploited for their personal data and privacy as human right is ignored while handful of actors are unfairly amassing wealth generated by personal data. We are the product, lacking any rights. In short, we can argue that we live in times of increasing data slavery.

Fair Data Society is a vision and initivate that seeks to provide an alternative. Initiated by Datafund project, it follows a vision where humans are at the center, have full control over their digital selves while the value of data is – contrary to popular centralised services – fairly distributed. Data exchange is on a need-to-know basis, according to user consents and conditions while human rights and privacy are respected. To achieve this, FDS is developing fair data protocol where personal data is semantically organised and stored on Swarm, and Fairdrop dapp for ethical data exchange. FDS components can be reused by any other project. Moreover, FDS is actively connecting various stakeholders such as developers, academia, regulators, NGOs and governments to drive social change and raise awareness towards mentioned goals.

The talk will briefly present FDS initiative and give a demo of the Fairdrop dapp and PoC demo of our compute node, concluded with a call-to-action to build projects in an ethical way on fair data principles.

Bio/company pitch:
Datafund project guards personal data, provides safe storage and enables provable personal data exchange. Information is shared anonymized or on a need-to-know basis according to an agreement between exchanging parties. Datafund’s mission is to be an enabler of a fair data society.