From heaven to hell, is Swarm the "biggest lie in the blockchain"?

Swarm suddenly became popular, but with the end of the Coinlist public offering and the launch of the mainnet, the popularity suddenly dropped again.

Recently, people in various communities have teased: You bought ICP, I bought BZZ, we are both "king of heaven" projects. The implication is that both have become "giant pits" in the bull market.

According to the data, Huobi ICP hit a maximum of 1,555 US dollars and is currently only 51 US dollars. On OKEx, BZZ reached a peak of $22 and is currently at $11. However, before the Swarm mainnet went live, the internal price of BZZ reached hundreds of dollars in different exchanges.

The price plummeted, and miners found that Swarm mining was very pitiful. Some miners teased: "I haven't paid back my money until my grave grows grass." This made many people start to curse Swarm, saying that it is the biggest lie of the blockchain .

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There are no "miners" in Swarm, only "errand brothers" who take orders?

Before the mainnet goes live, the market guesses that Swarm mining is the same as Filecoin, it will have a concept of "block generation". But everyone can see that there is a big difference between Swarm and Filecoin. Even, you don't know if you can use "mining" and "miner" to describe the token output model and node service providers of the Swarm network.

According to the description of Lou Danfeng, the founder of GrayCloud, the focus of Swarm mining is not to "compete" for computing power, but to interact with data. "Traditional storage projects focus on the storage of effective data, and the key lies in the data itself, like a container. However, because Swarm stores 'instant data', it pays more attention to data interaction, that is, links, high-density data application scheduling, buffering , making Swarm more like an 'advanced data switch'."

It’s very technical to say so. To put it simply, Swarm is indeed a distributed storage project. Nodes provide storage and bandwidth for the Swarm network, and Swarm provides BZZ incentives for miners.

Currently, there are three main types of BZZ incentives in Swarm, namely storage incentives, discovery incentives, and bandwidth incentives. Corresponding to "storage data service", "search node service" and "bandwidth service" respectively.

For example, suppose a user in the Swarm network initiates a task, that is, a request to store and distribute data, and the reward is 50BZZ. At this time, the nodes in the network, that is, the storage and broadband providers, receive and complete this task, and then Get BZZ rewards. In other words, as a node, it is a provider of network services, and there is no concept of traditional storage project mining.

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Swarm fell from heaven to hell, whose fault is it?

There is a problem with the alternative mining of Swarm, or the service model. Assuming no one initiates the task, how can the node obtain BZZ? The answer is that it cannot be obtained.

The public gradually discovered this situation after the mainnet version 1.0 was launched on June 21. It greatly exceeded the expectations of investors, especially some node service providers.

Participants in Swarm mining have a high probability of being planted. Judging from the current data, there are very few BZZs that can be produced by 500,000 nodes, and the situation is not optimistic. A miner complained: "When grass grows on my grave, I haven't even paid back my money."

Currently, Swarm is in an embarrassing situation where rats cross the street and everyone shouts and beats them. On the one hand, mining is not easy, on the other hand, the price of BZZ is much lower than market expectations. Many people even think that Swarm is finished.

Practitioner Yu Xinpeng believes that there are two reasons for the current situation.

First, the early expectations are too high, but the reality is too cruel. High expectations lie in the impact of storage projects such as Filecoin, the super high price of BZZ futures on exchanges, and the crazy buying of Coinlist. This makes many people think that Swarm should be a king-level project, and the price of BZZ will not be low. "The boost from the media has also pushed up market expectations." He said.

Second, the problem of the project side, before and after the launch of the mainnet, and even now, the disclosure of Swarm information is extremely untimely. Some people call it "squeezing toothpaste". This has led to misunderstanding and misreading by the community.

However, what he did not mention is that the reason why too many people expressed disappointment in Swarm, and even called it a "blockchain lie", must be related to the service providers who sell nodes. When the main network is not online and the economic model is uncertain, too many service providers compete for users under the pretext of "scrambling for the top mine". equipment. As a result, things backfired.

Now, some node service providers have proposed corresponding solutions.

1. Dual mining, use the purchased Swarm hardware to mine BZZ and mine other project tokens at the same time.

2. Switching to mining, converting the equipment to computing power such as Filecoin or Chia, which involves the replacement of some hardware equipment.

3. Money back.

The current mining income of Swarm has become very uncertain, which dissuades many merchants and investors. This is also the reason why the popularity of Swarm suddenly dropped.

Undoubtedly, from madness to today's low, Swarm perfectly interprets the madness and irrationality of the cryptocurrency market.

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Can Swarm still fight? August 2nd is "Great Miracle Day"?

For investors and practitioners who are already on board, August 2 may be a critical node for Swarm. At that time, the main network of the project will be officially launched and BZZ mining will be started. In other words, there are still some variables in the project before it goes online. Just like Filecoin, its economic model has changed a lot since the mainnet was launched.

Recently, when a member of the development team answered a practitioner’s suggestion on improving the node operator’s reward system so that the node has enough income to support operations, he replied: This is definitely a goal, and we are very grateful for the patience of the node.

Interestingly, some people think that with the development of the ecology, or as a last resort, Swarm is not unable to increase the "explosive block consensus". After all, everything can be changed.

In fact, Swarm should be a distributed storage project that plays a very important role in Ethereum. Its main goal is to provide sufficiently decentralized and redundant Ethereum public record storage, especially for storing and distributing DAPP codes and data.

Just imagine, once it goes online, it might be able to serve Uniswap, AAVE, Sushi and other projects. With the help of Swarm, Ethereum will truly build a decentralized world from the source of data. Moreover, according to the current development of Ethereum, there are many applications based on the Ethereum public chain, and the data storage and distribution market is worth looking forward to. The better the development of Ethereum, the higher the ceiling of Swarm in theory.

But the question now may be whether there will be so many task requests in the future, that is, whether the above-mentioned projects should be handed over to Swarm for data services. After all, there isn't much of a problem without Swarm at the moment.

Some practitioners speculate that this process from zero to one may require project officials to actively expand, such as spending money to let some projects use Swarm first.