TL;DR Join us on Tuesday, 27 April 2021 at 15:00 CET for a sneak preview and look out for upcoming release events to mark the upcoming Bee 0.6.0 release featuring Postage Stamps, Light Node mode and more! When 0.6.0 is released, you must update your node software in order to stay in the swarm. Join our Discord server and watch the #bee-node-updates channel for more information.

The Russian translation is available here: https://bit.ly/3xuGv7R

Join #bee-testing for help and discussion on the network update to 0.6.0. We are now concentrating on improving our network. Thanks for all your efforts and for being involved!

Please watch closely for future updates so that you can remain part of our swarm.

Announcement

Attention all Bee node operators, developers and network users!

Bee v0.5.3 has been spinning for a while now, but our dev team have not been idling. In the background, we have been working on the v0.6.0 release, which is almost ready for a test drive.

We are humbled and delighted to have seen the amazing activity on our Github and Discord, with unexpectedly huge numbers of users joining our community, trying out Bee, reporting bugs and suggesting improvements. We’ve been bowled over by the response, which has seen the community creating tools and Dapps which work with Bee, contributing code to our documentation and even to the Bee node client codebase itself! Thank you to everyone who has worked together to make our amazing community grow so quickly. We wholeheartedly appreciate your efforts. ❤️

Our minds are buzzing, and we would love to share with you our plan for the next couple of weeks of testing and workshops, after which we will begin the testnet rollout of Bee v0.6.0.

Join us on Tuesday, 27 April 2021 at 15:00 CET at a public demo session to see the latest and greatest features, and get hands on with the Bee development team.

With 0.6.0, as well as many improvements to our codebase and network infrastructure improvements, we will introduce 4 important new features.

The highlight of the 0.6.0 release is Postage Stamps. This long-awaited feature allows uploaders to pay with gBZZ to prioritise their chunks in the network. We will also see the introduction of a Light Node mode for Bee. This mode allows Bee to abstain from acting in a storage and forwarding capacity, and opens up many additional possibilities for nodes to interact with the network. Additionally, File Representation represents an important iteration on our file system manifests, improving the performance of website hosting in the Swarm. 0.6.0 will represent a massive step forward towards a stable 1.0.0 Bee release that will be a pleasure to use for the whole of the swarm.

We are delighted to share our work with you and hear your feedback. To facilitate this, we would like to invite interested parties to our public demo event (Tuesday, 27 April 2021 at 15:00 CET), where we will ask you to help us with our last stage of acceptance testing and try out the latest release. Here, you’ll see Postage Stamps, Light Nodes, the new manifests, and our new Pinning api!

Please join us in #bee-testing and look out for #bee-node-updates on our Discord server to get involved!

Members of our wonderful dev team will also be on hand to answer your questions. 🐝

Improving Network Syncing and Retrieval Reliability

As a result of the overwhelming success of the Rise of Bee airdrop, you may have noticed that the swarm has encountered some scaling and performance issues in relation to retrieving and syncing chunks. Our development team has been working hard to smooth out these issues and we hope that 0.6.0 will represent a leap forward in this sense for the entire network.

At Swarm, we are committed to providing a quality service. We know that the features we develop are entirely dependent on the network on top of which they operate. We currently find ourselves in a very fortunate situation due the Rise Of Bee Airdrop — thanks to your amazing response, we now have a realistic test-environment, which has been formed by more than 48,000 Bee’s so far! (source). With this incredible resource, and your continued support, we are confident that we will be able to create the swarm we have envisioned and are working towards.

We plan to work intensively with this opportunity in the coming two weeks. Node owners, thanks again for your support and look out for more opportunities to help us make our network fly!

A big thank you to all those who have reported issues so far; we really couldn’t do this without you. We’ve been busy working hard to fix these, and we’re excited to continue to improve this amazing resource to improve the stability and performance of Bee and the Swarm network as a whole.

That’s it for now

We are looking forward to working with you in the coming weeks towards a successful v0.6.0 release!