The beginning of 2021 was busy as always. After a short New Years’ Eve break, the team dived right back into work and we are happy to share two new releases — the new release of Swarm Bee and the Alpha release of the bee-js libraries.

The comms team was busy planning and organizing the Liberate Data Week hackathon that is happening this week. This event is organized by Fair Data Society and it will cover many fair-data-related topics. The event is thus not interesting only to developers but will cover many interesting topics, presentations, demos, and valuable announcements for a broader audience.

Make sure you register for the event. Click here.

Core Track

• In the last month, the Bee team has released the Swarm 0.4.2 version and done most of the work for the 0.5.0 release.
• Apart from the released features and improvements, we are steadily building the postage stamps system on top of Bee. This feature offers users a tool to signal the priority of preserving content stored in Swarm in case capacity shortage makes garbage collection necessary! The postage stamp system is not far from completion, but since it affects the heart of Swarm nodes, we want to take our time to properly test this feature and polish it before releasing it to you.

DevOps Track

• Deployed Bee (v0.4.2) to public cluster.
• Released a new version of Bee Helm chart (v0.6.5).
• Released a new version of Beekeeper Helm chart (v0.1.9).
• Released a new version of Beekeeper (v0.4.2) with support for dynamic clusters.
• Updated bee-staging and bee-local repos to support the latest Bee/Beekeeper versions.
• Added option for exporting keys from bee-clef and easy import to external wallets.

JS Track

• Alpha release of bee-js: Javascript client library for Bee
• Started working on a CLI tool for simplifying certain operations
• https://github.com/ethersphere/swarm-cli
• The first version supports uploading websites to Swarm

Ecosystem Track

• The first two waves of Swarm grants gave Swarm’s ecosystem a nice boost and we now have a variety of interesting projects building on Swarm. Here is the list of the projects that successfully applied for a grant in the second wave. The third wave of grants is still open. Make sure you don’t miss out.