Monthly Development Update – February 2026

February was a strong month of steady execution across the stack: Bee 2.7.0 rolled out smoothly and is already followed by active testing for the next patch release, while research continues to define the next round of protocol, tokenomics, and multichain work. Across the developer layer, Bee-JS was updated for Bee 2.7 compatibility with several practical improvements, and ecosystem teams kept pushing on usability, AI integration, provenance tooling, and early product prototypes—from the Swarm Desktop File Manager and Mobile Node PoC to Datafund’s blockchain-anchored provenance toolkit. The overall direction is clear: improving core reliability while making Swarm easier to build on, easier to operate, and more relevant to real-world applications.

Bee Track

Successful 2.7.0 Rollout: Bee 2.7.0 was officially released on February 10th as a safe, drop-in upgrade. The rollout has been highly successful, with nearly 90% of nodes already upgraded. You can find more detailed information about this release in our blog post and the full release notes.
Active Testing for 2.7.1: Following the release, the team identified further optimizations around libp2p and Kademlia. A Release Candidate for these improvements is already live on the public testnet.
March Deliverables and Next Steps: The 2.7.1 patch release is expected to land in March. This will be followed by additional patch releases to consistently improve node reliability and efficiency.

Research Track

Development planning for the Pullsync changes is underway, focusing on improvements to network stability in certain edge cases.
Multichain testnet experiments are scheduled for the month ahead.
Tokenomics roadmap priorities and implementation details are being defined, starting with withdrawable stake.

JS Track

Apps

Bee-JS

Released versions v11.0.0, v11.1.0 and v11.1.1 (latest).
- We have updated API compatibility to match the newly released Bee v2.7.0.
- The internal utility function “convertEnvelopeToMarshaledStamp” and type “UploadProgress” have been exposed.
- AbortController support has been added, allowing HTTP calls to be cancelled from the caller side.
- Uint8Array request payloads have been replaced with ArrayBuffers to work around an upload size limitation in browser environments.
- The create-swarm-app quickstart project has been updated as well for the new Bee-JS version.

Multichain Library

We are continuing QA work on the Multichain Funding widget. While the app already functions properly most of the time, we are still patching rare edge cases and improving stability with additional retry logic and a second line of JSON-RPC providers for multiple supported blockchains.

Ecosystem

Solar Punk

File Management/Swarm Desktop:
- Swarm Desktop v0.52.1: Provided official support for Bee v2.7 along with bug fixes.
- Future Planning: Active planning is underway for advanced Folder Handling and the integration of Multichain Funding directly within the File Manager interface to simplify node operations.
AI/DeSci: In collaboration with Taltech, we have started detailed project planning for a Sovereign Health Data Wallet. This PoC focuses on emergency use cases, demonstrating how Swarm can securely host critical medical data.
AI Integration (MCP): Swarm MCP has been updated to include the latest MCP specification changes. As the space is evolving rapidly, business research is underway to guide the next phase of AI-related development on Swarm.
Mobile Node PoC: We have finalized UI refinements and are currently conducting performance measurements before moving toward specifying the requirement for the MVP phase.
Multimedia & Streaming: The team is focused on adding smaller features based on real-life learnings to MSRS (Limited Live Streaming MVP) product currently used, for example, by CryptoMondays. The roadmap for the next architectural additions has also been completed, including features such as transcoding and identity management using SwarmID.

Datafund

Blockchain Anchoring Across CLI and SDK: Added on-chain provenance anchoring to both the Python CLI and TypeScript SDK, supporting the Base Sepolia testnet. Provenance records can now be anchored to a blockchain with chain status queries, delegation, batch anchoring, and transfer protection. Chain workflow documentation and diagrams have also been added.
TypeScript SDK v0.2.0 Released with Blockchain Support: The SDK now includes ChainClient for blockchain anchoring with batch operations, transform tracking, delegation, and status queries. A blockchain anchoring UI has also been added to the demo web app. A CI/CD pipeline with npm trusted publishing (OIDC) has been set up for automated releases.
CLI Examples Library: Added 10+ example scripts covering basic upload/download, domain-specific use cases (audit trails, scientific data, encrypted data, market memory), batch processing, stamp management, CI/CD integration, and verification workflows.
Provenance Hub Repo and Landing Page: Created a unified datafund/provenance umbrella repo with architecture overview and toolkit documentation. The provenance.datafund.io landing page has also been updated with new information.

DevRel

Documentation

A new “description” field was added to the front matter of each article in the documentation to provide a brief summary and improve LLM compatibility.

Content

Events

Swarm Community Call – 26 February

February’s Swarm Community Call focused on three areas: a look back at the Bee 2.7 release and what comes next, a walkthrough of the new “Building on Swarm” developer guides, and a forward-looking community talk on identity management led by the Snaha team. While the Swarm Foundation remains focused on refining core infrastructure, we are also steadily reducing friction for both builders and end users.

You are welcome to watch the full event recording here.

Upcoming events

Swarm Workshops

Introducing: a new series of practical, no-fluff workshops. First up in March is How to Decentralize Any Frontend – a beginner-to-intermediate session on hosting dApps and websites on decentralized infrastructure, without the usual friction. We’ll cover three routes depending on your knowledge and expectations: Beeport for drag-drop-deploy simplicity; the Swarm Desktop App for* direct control with no middleman*; and Bee light node + swarm-cli for full terminal-based flexibility.

In a world where building a site is now trivial, the real question is whether you still need to hand it over to a platform. This workshop is about how not to.

Swarm Community Call – 26 March

The next Swarm Community Call will take place on Thursday, 26 March, as usual on the last Thursday of the month, at 17:00 CET – broadcast on the Swarm Foundation’s X.

People & Culture team

If you are interested in joining the team and believe you have outstanding skills, visit our careers page https://www.ethswarm.org/jobs or simply drop us a message at talent@ethswarm.org!

Follow Swarm community news on X / Twitter.
Discussions about Swarm can be found on Reddit.
All tech support and other channels have moved to Discord!
Please feel free to reach out via info@ethswarm.org
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