On 8 May the annual SOS18 kicked-off for real. It featured eight talks that included everything from low-level code to a high-level overview of applications that could plug into Swarm.

The laptops were on, the code was flowing. Welcom to SOS18.

Swarm’s lead developer Viktor Tron kicked the summit off with his presentation titled “Vision of Web 3.0 and the Swarm base layer infrastructure”. In it, he presented some of the base layer services that Swarm, in collaboration with other companies working on the Ethereum platform, offers for real-time interactive web applications. These range from rendering, hosting, access control, consensus critical business logic etc. He also announced a POC 3 for Q2 in 2018 that will bring major stability and performance improvements to Swarm.

Turning the old world upside down

Next it was Doug Leonard’s turn from Mainframe. He took us back to the 90’s through a funny and anecdotal talk of how Dell outsourced small value-add components to Asus until Asus was finally able to build their own computers.

Through this, he demonstrated how projects like Swarm can turn things upside down for established players. By taking small value-adding chunks, like leftover storage on someone’s hard drive, and bundling them together into something more complex you can offer a service that could eventually scare the big guys.

Getting down to details

Third up was Swarm’s developer Ralph Pichler who presented the SWAP channel contract code that employs a chequebook smart contract for payments.

Anton Evangelatov took the vacated podium. In his talk he showed us the current state of Swarm’s simulation framework and showed the audience the steps of how they can run their own simulations on Swarm’s network.

Just before the lunch break Januš Guljaš, Swarm’s core dev, presented us Swarm’s basic unit of storage, chunks, and a new functionality, streams. He highlighted how chunks can be used, among other things, to store data in nodes and calculate data distance from nodes, while using streams as an identifiers for sequences of chunks.

How to get from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0?

Carl Youngblood’s talk from Mainframe opened the second part of the first day. He focused on the transitioning from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 and the services that we need to redesign in order for the transition: from domain names management, data services communication tools and payments to file storage. That means that paypals, visas, gmails, gdrives are in need of getting a decentralised counterpart. A big differentiator for them will be the embedded incentivisation mechanisms.

As Carl pointed out Mainframe’s platform enables different decentralised base layer services to plug into the platform and develop incentivisation models for users of different dapps. It will also offer open-source developer tools.

The last talk was from Javier Peletier who presented Ethergit, which combines Swarm storage with ethereum smart contracts for safer code storage and to achieve better code-governing logic.

It was a great day, packed with new insights, great Q&A sessions and an overall positive vibe. We’re looking forward to what the new batch of speakers will offer us on Wednesday.

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