Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

As the calendar loops around, orbiting the months and seasons from winter to summer and back again, I always feel my life begins anew with the new year. And as is customary for us nostalgic humans, I too take a brief opportunity to reflect what the last full orbit has revealed to me. The nostalgia and accompanying feelings remind me that our world is infinitely abundant, or at least only bound by the walls we put around our creativity, passion, ingenuity, and guile. It’s inspiring, but tempered by the knowledge that, unlike the nature of a calendar, which seems to loop infinitely, human existence is a straight line; finite, and short.

However, our life journey is not a straight line, and looking back at increments of time that are equal to or greater than four full seasons, one gets the benefits of long range perspective. You see how events you attended, situations you experienced, decisions you made, and people you met changed the course of your life forever. Even what may have seemed like minuscule interactions at the time, had a reverberating impact that only now, given hindsight, reveals itself.

It turns out that for me, the collective events, situations, decisions, and people that made up 2017 have had a profound effect on my life. And it centers around the amazing project we call Swarm City.

Photo by Boris Smokrovic on Unsplash

Swarm City was born when our community forked on January 1st, 2017. Though there is no need to rehash the events that lead up to it, I do want to mention that it was this moment that first showcased the values of our community. We value decentralization and human empowerment, and in order to realize our dream of unstoppable, voluntary interactions, the only option was the path we took. And by taking this path we have found a worldwide swarm of people who have stood by us and each other, through the process of building the tools free people will use.

It has not always been easy, particularly when thieves stole the majority of our funds, but every obstacle has become a galvanizer. Every challenge has leveled us up, and we used the past year to make serious headway towards the completion of the Swarm City ecosystem. In 2017 we:

Released “Terminal”, which is a user’s identity in swarm City. With it, users may create their profile and wallet, and send and receive SWT.

Created ARC to SWT swap contract, that generates SWT at a 1:1 ratio when ARC is sent to it. The ARC is forever destroyed.

Released Boardwalk V1, which is one of the first working decentralized commerce apps. Users can find each other, communicate, transact, and earn reputation in the first Swarm City marketplace, which is called #pioneer.

Presented Swarm City Labs at DevCon 3.

Created a solution for the “I need gas to send SWT” chicken/egg problem.

Attracted dev talent from all over the world, including Europe, Asia, and the Americas in particular.

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

Much is planned for the new year. Our production development team’s first priority is to finish Boardwalk V2. V2 will work flawlessly on all operating systems, and introduce 3 new marketplaces (hashtags), as well as conflict resolution, and deal cancel. But the best part is soon thereafter, users will be able to create and run their own hashtags. We’ll all be learning what qualities make a marketplace desirable to transact in, and hashtag owners will learn how best to attract users to their marketplace.

While we are busy exploring the new functionality V2 will bring to the Swarm City ecosystem, production dev will be building the very first storefront. A storefront is a graphical user interface (GUI) that makes using hashtags more friendly. For instance, a rideshare Storefront would most likely have an interactive map, because that would be useful in a rideshare marketplace. This first Storefront will act as a “Hello World” template for other devs. In the future there will be perhaps thousands of Storefronts to choose from, and will be chosen based on what functionalities a marketplace owner wishes to have.

After Storefront, the last major dev push is creating “hives”. In Swarm City, hives are communities of people who share similar values. Hives allows people to group together under the same governance structure, and pool resources and reputation. For example, a community of rideshare drivers could band together as a hive, and share resources to procure group insurance. And their combined reputation will impact whether or not users are drawn to them in the marketplaces they inhabit.

Also, it’s important to note that we know we belong to a greater Ethereum community. Because of that, we have made it a point to align ourselves with like-minded projects. We also have been allocating (and will continue to allocate) dev resources to solving community-wide challenges like data-persistence, and the need to obtain gas for transactions. Swarm City Labs is making progress on those fronts.

Photo by Guilherme Cunha on Unsplash

For the last few months we have been solely focused on developing the Swarm City platform; barely concerned with anything besides building. From an outside perspective we might appear to be in hibernation, because we’ve made little noise. It’s always been my preference to let #devhive do the most talking with their code, and I supplement that with words when needed. But for those of you who follow #devhive in Slack, or our GitHub repositories, you know how much progress we are making. So much so, that I am confident that in the year 2018, we are the giant that awakes. We are coming, and you will love it.

If you’d like to stay in touch with Swarm City, please follow @SwarmCityDapp on Twitter, or for more in depth conversations, join our Slack community here.

Cheers to my cohort: @kingflurkel, @kikipluche, @jennwilliams, @sponnet, @faffy_dee, @berndlapp, @will, @xardas, and @edu. You inspire me.

Peace to you all. Let’s meet on the boardwalk!