What is Swarm?
Ethereum, as the most important underlying public blockchain in the current blockchain field, has made considerable progress in both transmission and computing after a long period of development, especially with the upgrading and launching of the upcoming EIP1599 proposal, its transmission and computing capabilities will move to a new level. However, Ethereum has not had a better solution only in the field of storage.
Swarm was born to solve the storage problem of Ethereum, which can effectively solve the resource support such as application data storage and bandwidth on the Ethereum blockchain. The biggest selling point of Swarm is that it is a halo project led and endorsed by Vitalik Buterin, with the Ethereum Foundation as the lead investor and developer. With well-known investors, it has received investment from many well-known institutions such as DFG, KR1, HASHKEY, NGC Venture, LD Capital, P2P CAPITAL, and Waterdrip Capital, and has been the focus of the market since the establishment of the Project.
In fact, according to official data disclosed, the official Ethereum team began preliminary research on storage as early as 2015 after Ethereum was launched by the team. At that time, Swarm was designed as a long-term development plan by the Ethereum team, aiming to solve some of the project technology application problems that currently exist in Ethereum. This is basically similar to the function settings of IPFS, but the ways they work are quite different.
Importance of Swarm
Swarm can provide better data storage services. Both enterprises and individuals have a keen demand for data storage, but the cost of data storage services on the current market is generally high, with a risk of information leakage. In the era of big data, privacy protection is a problem that every enterprise and individual need to face. When our information is put up for sale, we are actually very passive. While Swarm hand over the discretion of the data to the user, only users can decide their own data.
With a huge user base of Ethereum, distributed storage, high-intensity privacy protection, and low information transmission costs, Swarm is worthy of the leading project in the storage sector.
Despite the strong background, there are still problems in BZZ
Despite the strong background of Swarm, its token, BZZ, has not performed well since it was launched. The current price is about USD 8 and has dropped more than 90% compared to the high point (futures price). The users who purchased the BZZ mining rig futures on the market suffered heavy loss. The price performance of BZZ formed a sharp contrast to its strong background, attracting a strong criticism from users and being ridiculed as a "Death" project.
From the expected storage leader to the current continued downturn performance, Swarm indeed is jaw-dropping. In fact, it is not surprising that Swarm has changed from the king level to "the death level" if we think about all kinds of things since its launch. The main reason is that the token release rules of BZZ are not set reasonably, and BZZ is not enabled deeply so that miners do not dare to participate.
What makes miners so worry about it?
The Swarm mainnet was officially launched on June 21, and the output mechanism of BZZ was explained officially through the video conference, mainly including two points: 1. No pledge is required to mine BZZ. 2. No locked positions.
Without pledge and locked positions, plus low requirements for hardware by Swarm, the mining threshold is greatly reduced. Historically, it is such seemingly low-threshold mining that has the maximum damage to miners.
Taking Chia as an example, Chia hard disk mining is a typical mining project without threshold, in which there are no high requirements for hardware, and it is not required to pledge tokens and lock positions. A large number of users were attracted to participate in mining once such no-threshold mining was launched, and even many IPFS miners also turned to Chia. However, with the increasing number of participants, the hashrate of the whole Chia network increased rapidly, and the mining output was constantly decreasing. In addition, as the Chia price kept dropping, the cycle of miners' payoff period was extended indefinitely, so that the cost that users bought hardware was almost unrecoverable, and many miners who turned to Chia have turned back to IPFS.
It turns out that it is difficult to continue the mining without barriers, which will ultimately damage the interests of miners and token holders.
In fact, Swarm could be even better. There are indeed many problems in the current incentive model. The existence of miners has become awkward. The official wanted miners to pack data and maintain the operation of the entire system, but did not want them to participate in the project, so that miners could not participate deeply, causing no effective maintenance given to the network of the entire system. The miners did not dare to participate rashly before seeing the official clear statement. The hot BZZ mining market became depressed, and the miners and users who made deployment in Bzz mining in early stage suffered a huge loss.
This is very similar to the case when IPFS was just launched. The terrible incentive system model at the time when IPFS mainnet was just launched made it impossible for miners to participate, causing large-scale strike of miners, and even no block generation of the whole IPFS mainnet for a long time and the situation that no one packed the data. Fortunately, IPFS official made adjustment timely, and IPFS was also returned to normal. It now seems that the reform by the IPFS official is effective. Can Swarm make changes in reference to that by the IPFS official?
(The screenshot comes from the FIL browser)
Undoubtedly, the concept of Swarm is very good, but this incentive system is really doubtful. Is there any way to change this situation? Currently, various proposals on how to "save" this project has been put forward in the SWARM community, including the idea of forking BZZ proposed by many participants, in which the technical architecture of SWARM is used, but the token incentive model is improved to protect interests of miners and node maintainers. Even the official developers of SWARM expressed their support for this.
BXX was born in this context, which completely adopts the mainnet of SWARM and maximizes the network characteristics through the optimization of smart contracts and economic models. The biggest change of BXX is to guarantee the interests of miners and node participants, allowing miners to deeply participate in the project.
Basic Information of BXX
The vision of BXX is to realize the consistency of the interests of mines and users with the ecosystem. The total amount of BXX tokens is exactly the same as that of BZZ. Compared with BZZ, BXX is mainly featured in that it re-integrates the resources of miners and creates greater value for miners.
(BXX token distribution)
Let's take a look at the most critical point: BXX node pledge rules
1. It is required to pledge BXX for node operation.
2. Miners can initiate an unlocking request to the BXX pledged at the node, and BXX will start to be unlocked on the 7th day after the request is initiated, and the linear unlocking will be completed within 7 days.
3. After miners initiate to unlock the pledged tokens, the corresponding node cannot operate normally.
The above-mentioned measures can ensure that BXX will be needed by miners continuously, especially the pre-pledge mechanism, which is an important application scenario of BXX. If miners want to mine, they must purchase BXX continuously. It also takes a certain period of time to unblock BXX reward, and nodes cannot participate in block generation during the unlocking. A series of measures ensure the stable operation of BXX ecosystem.
In addition, BXX will also launch the DAO organization, which will be used for the mechanism of off-chain community discussion and on-chain execution. The board directors is elected through a referendum, and each board member will serve a term of 1 year. The voting proposals can be screened, and the approved proposals will be submitted for the referendum. BXX holders can also raise proposals, so that the right of governance is truly handed over to the community.
Project parties, miners, and users truly become a community of interests under the BXX system.
Compared to BZZ, BXX is friendlier to miners and users, and continues to use the mainnet of Swarm. The entire system will become more efficient and is taking advantage of the Swarm network features.
In general, BXX is a better BZZ. It is not difficult for miners to choose to mine BZZ or BXX. BXX takes into account the interests of the project parties, miners and users. The miners vote with their feet to select the token to be mined. In addition, in view of too many tokens released in the early stage of BZZ, mining revenue will further decrease with a massive influx of miners, and miners still have a strong willingness to mine BXX.
Undoubtedly, Swarm is a high-quality project, but the performance fails to meet market expectations due to various reasons. BXX, as an upgraded version of BZZ, successfully unites project parties, miners and users to become a community of interests. All parties jointly promote the development of Swarm to realize efficient data transmission and storage. We are looking forward to BXX giving us a satisfactory answer.
