The Swarm Team is pleased to announce the immediate release of Swarm client v0.3, the third proof-of-concept release (POC3) of the Ethereum Swarm client. The POC3 code is now merged into the official go-ethereum repository’s master branch.

Swarm 0.3 has been deployed to the public Testnet, and the Ethereum Foundation is running a 50-node strong cluster of Swarm nodes together with a public web gateway on https://swarm-gateways.net. We welcome everyone to try it out or commit to operate stable nodes.

The past year

It has been a year and a half since the first release of the POC2 series was deployed and the Swarm project launched its public alpha network.
Two Swarm summits, two orange papers and forty thousand lines of code later, it is time to take stock.

In the past year the Swarm team has grown in size and is now on fire delivering the vision. We have been busy redesigning the network layer, rewriting the retrieval protocol using a stream abstraction, rewriting connectivity management and the overlay network code as well as developed a sophisticated network simulation framework to test algorithmic correctness, scalability and fault tolerance of various subsystems.
POC3 code was finalised just in time for the Swarm Orange Summit in Ljubljana, where we had 80 participants and a very inspiring and creative week (watch this two-minute video hosted on Swarm) of talks and coding. It is inspiring to see a growing number of contributors and companies that want to build on swarm.

Swarm 0.3

Swarm content storage is a lot more than just “bittorrent on steroids”. The technical details can be found in the chapter on architecture in the new and improved Swarm guide. You’ll find a more thorough academic presentation of Swarm’s components in the orange papers or learn more about Swarm through the recorded conference talks.

In an earlier blog post, we introduced the basics of Swarm storage and content distribution.

At its core, Swarm is a service that provides APIs to upload and download content to the cloud and through URL-based addressing offers virtual hosting of websites and decentralised applications (dapps) without webservers, using decentralised peer-to-peer distributed infrastructure. The vision is that of a new internet which is not only fault-tolerant, has zero downtime and offers censorship resistance but is also economically self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system. By compensating nodes for contributing their bandwidth and disk space, these incentives aim to achieve reliable low-latency scalable retrieval of popular content on the one hand and guarantees persistence of important yet rarely accessed data like archives or backups on the other. For smooth delivery Swarm will use the SWAP protocol (planned for POC3.1) while for storage guarantees it will use a two-tiered insurance system (planned for POC4).

Beyond the basics of data storage and delivery, the POC 3 release includes some new and experimental features.

PSS

The same p2p connections that are used for data storage and delivery can also be used for node-to-node messaging. PSS combines Swarm routing (bzz) with the Whisper (shh) encrypted message format (bzz+shh=pss). In short, PSS is a messaging protocol with strong privacy features running on top of the Swarm network. This messaging infrastructure can be the foundation of a whole new system of internode communication services (the email, tweet, newsletter of the future), hence, can be referred to as Postal Service over Swarm.

PSS is fully featured yet experimental on the new POC3 network and dapps can interact with it using a JSON RPC API. We are collaborating closely with companies and projects that want to use pss to build second-layer infrastructure. Mainframe is building a slack-alternative collaborative group communications tool (Onyx) and their web3 SDK, and Status have expressed interest in building it into their mobile chat.

Mutability

Another experimental new feature in POC3 is the Swarm Mutable Resource.
Typical in p2p storage systems, content is addressed by its digital fingerprint (hash) and any changes to the content results in a change of this address. Users of the web, however, are accustomed to mutable resources: when visiting URLs we expect to see the most up-to-date version of the ‘site’. In order to make it easy to access changing content at permanent human-readable addresses, Swarm integrates with the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) on the Ethereum blockchain. This is what allows us to reference Swarm content by names like bzz://theswarm.eth.

Swarm POC3 adds another layer in the form of Mutable Resource Updates (MRU). These allow off-chain updates of content associated with an address at a potentially faster pace than ENS updates on the blockchain could support and without incurring the cost of on-chain transactions.

MRU is an experimental feature in current POC3 testnet and is still undergoing changes.

FUSE support

FUSE enables users to integrate Swarm data directly into their local file systems (only on Linux and Mac). Using this system, users can “mount a Swarm manifest” as if it were a regular directory. It supports file system read and write operations, in which all content is automatically synced with the Swarm.
In future, combining FUSE with Swarm Mutable Resources, it should be possible, for example, to sync your entire home folder between devices – the backend to a decentralised storage with a Dropbox-like functionality.

Encryption support

Swarm 0.3 comes with built-in encryption allowing for secure uploads of private data. The way encryption works users can upload a directory privately and still ‘share’ a subdirectory with specific peers.

Access Control Trees (Swarm 0.3.2) will offer an API for users to manage access to content independently of publishing it. Granted access will work across versions of resources.

The year ahead

The year ahead will be both exciting and challenging. As part of the POC3 series we are planning to switch on a revamped SWAP accounting system (Swarm 0.3.1) and enable ‘light’ Swarm nodes (Swarm 0.3.2).
Implementing erasure coding, proof of custody, insurance are also on the roadmap.
We are on target delivering Swarm POC4 (production beta prerelease) in 2019.

We keep on building a community with our allies who champion the values of web3 and actively collaborate through working groups, building the foundational infrastructure, the backbone of second-layer services such as databases (http://wolk.com), private data management (http://datafund.io), rights and creative works licensing (http://jaak.io), decentralised version control (ethergit, http://epiclabs.io), video transcoding and streaming service (http://livepeer.org), communication and collaboration (https://mainframe.com) and the list is growing.

Contact Us

We welcome your feedback and contribution. Come find us in our gitter channel or our github repository.

While everyone is staring in amazement on December 1st, 12pm UTC anticipating the Eth 2.0 Beaconchain genesis, within the JavaScript team we quietly prepared our own little genesis release in the shadows. Being very much around the good ol’ Eth 1.0 chain we are nevertheless very much excited on this too.

Some background story: the EthereumJS ecosystem around the VM consists of a very modular set of libraries (vm, blockchain, merkle-patricia-tree, tx,…), each encapsulating its own dedicated set of functionality. While this is great for the user, it turned out to be not so great for development since it often becomes necessary to do changes on several libraries at once which is hard and time-consuming to act upon in a consistency-preserving way having the libraries in different repositories. So early this year we decided to update our setup and combine the VM-related libraries within a single monorepo. This is a single repository where it gets possible to target changes on several libraries within a single pull request and run all the different library test suites along all together to ensure consistency. At the same time benefits from having multiple packages all released individually remain.

Since the switch to the monorepo our development activity literally exploded. We discovered so many things that we wanted to make better that we just couldn’t stop, especially since one change often triggered another which was now just “so obvious to do”.

So we developed. And developed. And developed. Basically throughout the whole year. That is the main reason why you heard relatively little from us during the last months, we were just so busy with all this stuff.

While at the end of the process we sometimes wondered if we would ever get things together again (see our extensive release notes to get a feeling for what I mean), I am really proud today that I am able to finally announce: we did it. Thanks to an amazing team for all the great and dedicated work on this.

This is not one but six major releases on our main libraries with our virtual machine at the forefront:

In this post we won’t go much into the technical details and rather give a high level overview. For a more complete picture see the release notes linked above, we really cared for making these comprise and readable and give a good overview on all the relevant (breaking) changes.

Maybe just one important note: we switched to a new naming scheme along these releases and you need to use the new names to get the new versions. The former ethereumjs-vm package e.g. now installs as follows:

npm install @ethereumjs/vm

Ok. What is actually in it? Let’s have a quick look.

All Hardforks

EthereumJS VM v5 now supports all hardforks back to genesis. This is a primer in the history of JavaScript Ethereum and we hope that this will open up for various potentially exciting new use cases. We have got our own, more on this below.

A VM on a specific HF can be started with:

import VM from '@ethereumjs/vm';
import Common from '@ethereumjs/common';

const common = new Common({ chain: 'mainnet', hardfork: 'spuriousDragon' });
const vm = new VM({ common });

An EIP-centric VM

While hardforks are great to bundle a set of agreed changes together a hardfork-centric VM has turned out to not be flexible enough to enable a future-driven development where it is not finalized for quite some time which EIPs will make it into a new hardfork (the Berlin hardfork seems to be the best example for this yet).

With the new VM release the internal functional modularization layer has been reworked. This allows for EIPs to now become native citizens within the VM. A VM with a special set of EIPs can be instantiated as follows:

import Common from '@ethereumjs/common';
import VM from '@ethereumjs/vm';

const common = new Common({ chain: 'mainnet', eips: [2537] });
const vm = new VM({ common });

As a starter we support the following new EIPs (mostly targeted for the Berlin hardfork) with the VM v5release:

TypeScript

On this EthereumJS release cycle we can confidently say that we holistically brought our libraries to a modern technology stack. One big part of this: with the new releases we are closing in on our long planned and executed upon TypeScript transition and all our major libraries as well as internal dependencies are now written in TypeScript.

Just a peak what makes TypeScript so great and helps to make our libraries more robust and secure: TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript and let developers know the data types for each variable and each object used in the code. Is the variable called address a string or a binary Buffer object? While you get no explicit hints about this in JavaScript – which highly increases the risk for follow-up developer mistakes – in TypeScript you will know for sure.

It also gets a lot more fun to work on our libraries directly or use the libraries within a third-party project since as a developer you can now get hints like this in the IDE throughout the whole code base:

Your development environment with proper TypeScript typing now just knows that a blockchain variable is an @ethereumjs/blockchain object (hold on with your remarks, Go and Rust developers ) and not just “something”. So our own code gets respectively your (TypeScript) code will get a lot more readable on using the new library versions.

Promises

If you are not too much into JavaScript you can skip this section, but if you are a JavaScript developer you will likely sigh with relief on these news so we will at least give this a short mention:

Another transition finalized, all library APIs are now working with JavaScript Promises. So no more callbacks anywhere throughout our whole stack.

Library usage changes from:

blockchain.getBlock(blockId, block => {
  console.log(block);
});

New API example:

const block = await blockchain.getBlock(blockId);
console.log(block);

The little indentation on this first example might not seem to mean much on first sight. On several of these old style calls nested together you get deeper and deeper though and at some point code becomes unreadable. Just google “callback hell” if you are interested on how this can look like. Promises allow for writing significantly more readable code.

Library Refactorings

It’s sometimes a bit hard to imagine on the necessity of an engine change if the car is still running, nevertheless at some point it gets a necessity if you want to safely get through the next 10.000 miles. With refactoring in software it is often a bit similar. With this release series we reworked the fundamentals of some of our most central libraries and our block, our tx and partly our blockchain library received a significant rewrite.

It should now be a lot easier to work with these libraries and they should be well-prepared to provide a solid and secure basis to be build upon within the Ethereum JavaScript ecosystem for the years to come.

Outlook

We hope that you like our new releases. This post can just provide a sneak peak on the most important changes and things are covered in a lot more detail within the release notes linked at the beginning of this post. We are happy to hear your feedback on our Discord server or our new @EFJavaScript twitter account.

For ourselves these releases provide some solid ground to move to a more future-guided development cycle and we are eagerly looking forward to see this come into play. With the VM having all hardforks implemented it now gets possible to integrate the VM into our revamped EthereumJS Client project. We won’t join mainnet with this client anytime soon. But we will nevertheless become able to do our share to help improve on client diversity. The new client in its first stages will allow us to join development testnets like Yolo v2 (and following) and actively help to discover and protect against consensus bugs between clients. We will also be able to more actively contribute to future protocol research and participate in eventually following research implementations. You will hear more on this once we have a first usable version of our client ready (targeting fullsync on Yolo v2), this will be early next year.

For now we wish everyone a contemplative end of the year being complemented by an exciting beaconchain launch day (week)!

The EF JavaScript Team

Arjun Sethi, Kraken Co-CEO

With Krak, we have taken a bold step towards restructuring what we consider to be the most important layer of the world economy.

As far as I can remember, moving money felt broken. It’s one of the basics you expect to work, but whether you send a few dollars to a continental friend or wire funds, the process is slow, expensive and frustratingly opaque. That’s not the case in 2025.

Problem: A system left broken and broken

Most people don’t understand how old-fashioned financial infrastructure is yet. Traditional banks today are often run with software built in the 1970s. Many of the systems that enhance international payments have not been upgraded effectively in decades.

You can send messages and videos instantly anywhere in the world, but sending $100 can take several days.

This is primarily due to how fragmented and risk-averse traditional systems are. Domestic payments rely on batch processing. Crossbirder transfers include a daisy chain of correspondent banks, each with additional time, cost and friction. Regulatory barriers provide even more silo access.

And high prices – from wire fees to card interchanges to hidden FX markups, they’re everywhere.

Consider the scale of the problem

For most of the world, the simple act of sending or receiving money digitally remains a privilege rather than a fundamental right.

• Globally, more than 1.4 billion adults remain banks, leaving them completely excluded from the financial system.
• Even in an advanced economy, everyday users lose 2-3% in card transaction fees.
• International remittance fees get worse – often exceeding 6%, with some remittance corridors reaching double digits.

Much of this is rooted in outdated infrastructure. Many banks use mainframe systems written in COBOL (common business-oriented language), avoiding upgrades due to costs and risk. Regulations add even more complexity. Multiple jurisdictions, overlapping requirements, and “derisk” behaviors lead to uneven financial access and slower innovation.

Meanwhile, global reconciliation remains surprisingly slow. ACH transfer may take 2-3 business days, and international wiring may take 3-5 days. The system continues to process payments in batches without a real-time global clearing layer. What you need to do instantly is still slotted by a system that treats money like paper.

result? A financial world filled with delays, tolls and exclusion.

What we’re building instead

Krak is an all-in-one global money app built from the ground up on the Crypto infrastructure. It combines the familiarity of traditional funds with the speed, openness and flexibility of modern blockchain networks.

Krak is more than just another wallet or payment tool. It’s about completely rethinking how money works.

With Krak you can:

• Use Kraktags (the version of the payment handle) to instantly send and receive funds from over 160 countries.
• Translate over 300 assets seamlessly from Fiat, Crypto and Stablecoins.
• You earn rewards simply by retaining value in your account. There are no subscriptions. There is no lockup. There is no nonsense.
• Soon, spend worldwide on physical and virtual Krak cards.

This means that the financial system should have been lined up all along. Fast, borderless, open, not allowed.

Krak uses Stablecoins fully backed by reserves. Hold USDG and earn up to 4.1% APR from day 1. You can also earn up to 10% by staking other crypto assets. There is no minimum or hoop to jump.

And soon, you can borrow directly to your holdings using collateral-based loans. There are no credit checks. There are no documents. All you need to do is access to liquidity at any time.

I built this on unauthorized infrastructure. Public blockchain resolves transactions worldwide in real time. Assets are portable, interoperable and under your control. There is no intermediary to insert friction or costs. That means faster settlements, lower fees and more access.

I also believe in the issues of identity and access. Removes the need for a Kraktags account number or crypto wallet string. Sending value to friends next door and friends all over the world can be as intuitive as sending a message.

Why is this important?

At the heart of every economy is the ability to trade. The faster and cheaper you can move value, the more opportunities people will have. And when the cost of moving money drops to near zero, a new form of financial adjustment is possible.

This is not just about cryptography. It’s about making the financial system work better for everyone.

People don’t want any more features. They want less problems. They hope that they can send money, retain value, invest and borrow money without being punished at every step. They want to trust the company they use. And they want access to tools that will help them move forward – not an existing fee account.

Above all, they want a financial system that reflects how the world today works: digital, global, and always on.

Krak removes friction. There are no wire cutoffs. There will be no three-day settlements. There is no 6% fee to send money to your family. You will not be denied access to your own funds because of where you live or the amount you earned.

We believe that basic financial services are universally accessible and that money needs to travel as easily as information.

Where to go from here

The kraku is just the beginning. We see it as the foundation. Core building blocks of how people manage their money everywhere in the future.

This will be a long journey. There are things to improve, features to refine, systems to enhance. But our goal is clear. Remove friction from finance, move value freely, and build what people actually want to use.

We are not here to rebuild our bank.

We are here to build what comes here.

For years, Irish Bitcoin has been simmering quietly at the grassroots level, debated in pubs and meetups, debated in telegram groups, and sometimes splashed into headlines with predictable suspicion. However, recently the temperature has started to rise. With the release of “Sound Punt: Case of Ireland’s Interest in Bitcoin” by Bitcoin Network Ireland (BNI), and the weekend release that watches both the Bitcoin Ireland Conference and Aontú’s Ard Fheis, it’s clear that the Emerald Isle is gaining momentum.

Soundpants: Paper for Ireland’s citizens

A new paper released today by Bitcoin Network Ireland is a concise and accessible document created to get through the noise and present the benefits of Bitcoin to the general public and politicians alike. The purpose is simple. It offers a reasonable, jargonless entry point, especially in the age of euro decline and rising cost of living.

The name itself is a clever pun. It nods to both “sound money” and the Punt, the former Irish currency, but the majority view it as associated with risk, suggesting that it is downplaying what may be worth revaluing. This signal that it’s more than technology. It is about asserting financial sovereignty and reconsidering what makes money “good” in the first place.

What BNI is trying to achieve is to bridge the key gaps in understanding and to help citizens seeking change and government officials looking for solutions that recognize that sound, stateless money is valuable to everyone. As Parker Lewis famously said, “Like all successful money, Bitcoin is money for the enemy” – a neutral system that serves all participants regardless of political stance.

Long and complicated relationship with Irish money

To understand the importance of this moment, it is worth noting that the relationship between Ireland and money is always different from its European neighbours. The Romans introduced money to Britain more than 1,000 years before it was adopted in Ireland. Native Irish people resisted state-issued money and instead relied on barter and bullion to rely on the second millennium.

In ancient Ireland, the lack of money was a testament to a stateless, highly decentralized society, embracing multicenter legal systems that differed between clans. The ideal of that society was that the people of society did not rule over others, and that even the king could be disposed of if they abused their power.

It is therefore no coincidence that Ireland was the last European society to adopt money. Ultimately, it was forced into the land by the British crown in 1601, coinciding with the final stages of the nine-year war (1594-1603) and the increase in British rule in Ireland. To this day, Ireland had no own free floating currency. It has always been linked to external forces. First is the sterling of the pound, then the European currency system, and now the euro under the ECB. Therefore, it should not be a coincidence that the EU has not waned in recent years Ireland’s power and influence.

“Control the currency of the country, and I don’t care who is making that law.” – Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1743–1812)

Perhaps given this historical context, Ireland is set up on its own to understand the value of sound, the money of statelessness. Bitcoin represents a return to financial independence, ahead of state-issued currency, but with the technical advantages of the digital age. If the kingdom of ancient Ireland uses market products that cannot be manipulated by distant authorities, Bitcoin offers modern equivalents. It is a system that cannot be interpreted or controlled by any power, whether domestically or foreign.

This historic skepticism about centrally controlled currency is now resurfaced as the Irish state and its citizens face a new wave of economic uncertainty through the ba crimes of the euro and tariffs. Geopolitical and economic tensions rarely feel unstable. The tariff disputes, new questions about Ireland’s foreign direct investment model, and potential technology and pharmaceutical layoffs are sure to uncover the focus on sovereignty and resilience. The release of “A Sound Punt” is timely and invites you to once again question the wisdom of linking the country to faraway financial authorities.

Political crossroads

In line with the release of “A Sound Punt,” revered academic and BNI member Dr. Niall Burke proposes two moves at Aontú Ard Fheis (Party Conference). Aontú, the party that saw the biggest surge in votes in the last general election, has shown acceptance of Bitcoin, opening the door to a conversation that has been relegated to a margin until recently. The presentation and acceptance of Bitcoin movements at major party meetings is a marker of how the conversation is changing.

Meanwhile, the Bitcoin Ireland Conference brings together the country’s growing gospel, builders and supporters. These circles are once in the vicinity and are now finding doors open in the political world.

The public’s dissatisfaction and calls for financial autonomy

Bitcoiner isn’t the only one looking for alternatives. Ireland has witnessed its biggest public demonstration since the 2012 post-GFC era. Recent marches have attracted over 100,000 people to Dublin streets. These protests reflect deep frustration and a sense that political establishment is no longer cooperating with the people.

What’s particularly impressive is how Bitcoin serves as a common foundation for seemingly opposed interests. For protesters, Bitcoin offers protection from inflation and defends it from government overreach. For governments concerned about economic stability and growth, Bitcoin could be the very solution needed to protect pension funds, especially the pension funds and indeed the state’s very own investment funds. This is a paradox of sound, a stateless money promise. It enforces property rights and serves the interests of all, as it cannot be captured or controlled by a single faction.

Last but not least, MMA star Conor McGregor’s foray into both politics and Bitcoin was predicted a year ago, but for those listening to the ground, it has evolved for a while. His proposal for the National Bitcoin Reserve represents a broader national change. Bitcoin finally enters the era-list, and perhaps he is in the role of playing to keep it up, like BNI.

Bitcoin is an open source financial protocol, and adoption comes from all fields, regardless of politics. Bitcoin is neutral and does not support partisan causes. What is probably not fully recognized is how empowering Bitcoin can give us, and we need to focus on our ability to unite rather than splitting.

Return to the “Sound Pant” paper

The paper itself makes a compelling claim for Ireland’s interest in Bitcoin.

• Healthy Money Principles: It evaluates Bitcoin against the six properties of “good money”: durability, divisibility, uniformity, portability, verifiability and rarity.
• Value Store: This document highlights the fixed supply of Bitcoin as a protection against rising inflation and currency collapse.
• Practical examples: Provides evidence of Bitcoin monetization and compares the costs of buying a home with Euro and Bitcoin over a decade.
• General Concern Counterattack: This paper addresses the most common objections to Bitcoin: providing energy use, volatility, criminal activity, weakening of traditional currency, and balanced rebuttals to each.
• Action Steps: Rather than a theoretical argument, this paper outlines specific actions towards individuals, businesses, and governments, from education to strategic Bitcoin reserves.

The beginning of the process

No one is hoping that the Irish government will announce the Bitcoin Treasury next week, and it is debate whether it should be established at all. But “sound punts” mark the beginning of a process that will eventually help reconstruct Irish’s approach to money and economic sovereignty.

This accessible primer is just the first step in Bitcoin Network Ireland’s broader education mission. BNI will be releasing a much more comprehensive policy paper for policy makers in the coming months. This is currently going through the editing phase. While “sound punts” introduce the concept to the public, future documents provide detailed analysis and policy recommendations that decision makers need.

The goal is clear as BNI works to enhance this conversation through both public education and policy analysis. Help all citizens recognize Bitcoin’s universal value proposition. Maintaining a modest strategic allocation of Bitcoin, either at the individual or institutional level, hinders some degree of protection against uncertainty and hope in an age of growing concern.

Download Soundpants: Case of Irish interest in Bitcoin from the Bitcoin Network Ireland website.