The Original Ethereum Storage Vision: Key Features to Owning Your Data by A.Nagy | EPS 2025 Workshop

[applause] Okay. Hi everyone. Thanks for joining today. I'm super excited to be here. Uh my name is Shandor.

Uh I joined the swarm foundation actively like a year ago and we have been heavily uh working and uh delivering features to enable a more uh decentralized uh future for all of us. Today I will be talking about um swarm first and um after that some of the features that swarm can give you uh for protecting your privacy and finally I will present a couple of solutions that we built recently uh and hopefully you will like those. Okay, as you remember this week uh Vitalik has mentioned Swarm as part of the holy trinity of Ethereum from the so swarm has been here from the very very uh beginning and the team is very active now. Uh and u I would like to present you Victor the president of the swarm foundation who we have to thank a lot and I would like you to give a round of applause to him for his dedication and protecting the cy cippher punk values. He is a role model to all of us in Ethereum foundation.

So what is swarm? We like to refer to it as the back end of web 3. Why? Because uh we can build fully decentralized uh solutions on that. It's full stack decentralized.

We built uh websites applications that doesn't you need doesn't use any uh centralized uh servers. and uh I will present you at the at the end. The network itself is an open-source solution. You can verify the code itself and uh it's very transparent. You can see how everybody is treated equally in the network and uh we guarantees equal treatment of uh participants.

The building main building block of the network is uh the B node. Um currently the easiest way to interact with the network is to install the swarm uh desktop application and uh with that you can upload download um files uh in a very very easy way. We are working on a a browserbased uh solution that would not require any installation uh from you uh from the for the future but uh right now um it's it's in progress. Also I'd like to draw your attention to running nodes because this is a very very important part of the network and uh being able to provide a geographically distributed um network. It's um it would be great if you could also start your own uh node, your own full node which would participate in uh um data storage and um also transaction of uh messages.

Swarm is a u self-sustaining infrastructure. Uh it has a built-in incentive system. So if you run your node uh you will get rewarded but hopefully you would not only um participate for the financial reward but also uh to support the decentralized features and some of the p privacy uh features that we are here to uh talk about today. So with sw with swarm uh you can interact uh in an anonymous way. If you upload your file, it will be chopped up into small chunks and distributed all over the network and uh this enables or provides a plausible deniability to uh the network operators.

So as a network operator you don't know uh the contents uh of others that are uploaded. You don't see that. Also another guarantee is the forwarding cadmia used in the network that will um not reveal the originator of the uh data. Once your data is uploaded, you will uh get integrity protection on the network which means that um your content u using um the by using um algorithms, hashing algorithms, your your content will get a hash code and if you modify your content the the hash will change and this hash is serving a second purpose in the network which is basically the address of your content. So once uh you go to sour network use your hash you will be you can be sure that this data has not been tampered with and you are uh getting the data that you are uh that you uploaded and that you expect.

The system is also uh censorship resistant by design. It can host websites that is not uh cannot be modified. You you are you are uh nobody else is able to modify your data. You own uh your data and you also control it. How can you control it?

You can upload it if you want to make it public and make it available publicly or you can encrypt it and share the keys with trusted parties with your friends. And also you can use a recently built feature called uh ACT or access control that will uh add encryption to that that will encrypt your content. It gets uploaded to swarm and it will allow you to create a list of public keys that represent your your friends and then these friends identified on the network by this public key can access uh the data. So uh the data is distributed uh protected and always yours on swarm. Now I will show you a couple of examples that we uh built on swarm uh this year.

One of them is called Bport which is the easiest way to interact with the network without installation today. It allows you to upload and disappear if you want or uh come back to it and uh see how long uh your your storage is provided for you. you're you're welcome to check it out uh using this u QR code. And the next thing that we built uh in the AI space, we provided an MCP server. Oh yeah, it's working.

Okay. So we built an MCP server that allows agents, AI agents to upload, retrieve data uh to and from swarm and also share these between themselves. We have a decentralized video streaming live streaming that after the live stream is over uh stays there for for um playing u afterwards as well. The next thing is um fullstack decentralized application used on conferences. Hopefully this will uh be used more on web3 conferences to to use a decentralized solution uh on those events that also allows you group chat uh to discuss uh the topics presented on those events.

You can also have a look uh if you like. And for me, one of my favorite features that we are releasing soon, it's being tested most probably it's going to be live in January is the file manager. This will uh really enable all of us to upload files, folders and manage it very easily in in swarm uh in a decentralized way. Now, what else can you build? For example, Swarm could be used to build a zero league peer-to-peer uh messaging system or a data marketplace for AI agents.

Here I have to mention two features which is data provenence and access control which is super unique uh to to swarm and again I would like to encourage you to be part of the network uh run your own node and support swarm so that we can together build a self-s sovereign digital society. And finally, I would like to invite you to an event today. Uh right after this talk, uh we're going to be heading to a a side event where you can please read uh the QR code where you can learn how to launch your own AI agent on Swarm. So that was it. Thank you very much for your attention.

If you have any questions, let me know. Thank you.

[applause]