This year really has been something, huh? It’s been a year to remember. As much as there was good happening, it certainly had its downs and stress. Here is some exciting news for 2021 as we have the pleasure to announce new stars at the dawn of a new paradigm, a fair data economy.

At Swarm Beta, we announced the second Swarm grants call which concluded at the end of October.

Grant calls up to 1.0 are by design quite loose and exploratory in nature as we are interested in grant applications along these lines:

• Experimental and playful.
• Interoperable with other applications.
• Giving the user control over data.
• Aligned with principles.fairdatasociety.org .
• Free and open source.

The grant amounts given correspond to effort estimates expressed by grant applicants for reaching their first milestone where DAI 10k was the maximum possible amount. Where contacts are missing, the applicants did not want their names disclosed publicly.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Swarm Beta grant recipients are:

Swarmify (working title)

Swarmify wants to use Swarm for decentralized & fair music streaming. We do, too! Imagine, for example, an Android app connecting to Swarm and streaming music. If we add payment channels for reimbursing artists for plays, coupling all this with an on-chain DAO (Aragon) for governance, we have a very potent mix for a network of independent record labels and artiste alliances. This is Swarmify’s long-term goal and we are excited to support it. Let there be music.

Grant amount: DAI 4500 (in BZZ)

Beefree

We are all on Facebook and most of us complain about it. Facebook is the new smoking and we’re the product. Wouldn’t it be great that there was an alternative that empowers digital freedom? Here comes Beefree.

Beefree.me is building tools for the new web of abundance in partnership with Ethereum’s Swarm Technology. By simply removing the corporate middlemen, the community can share profits with blockchain-based smart contracts providing the community with a new tokenized, decentralized, secured, and private social web…

Grant amount: DAI 10k (in BZZ)

Zoomerok

Zoomerok is a mobile app with short entertainment videos stored on Swarm and you’re in control of your privacy and data. At this stage, the Zoomerok team wants to make the first version of the mobile iOS application, connected to Swarm and aligned to fair data society principles. All this while being extremely user-friendly. As a bonus, the ecosystem also gets the first swift Swarm library.

Grant amount: DAI 10k (in BZZ)

Formaviva

Before continuing to read, we advise readers to go to https://formaviva.com and just press play for one of the carefully curated mixes for techno connoisseurs. Formaviva is a gallery of contemporary electronic music and a mighty fine one, we may add. The team behind Formaviva says: “Our mission at Formaviva is to build a creative, community-driven space that nurtures musical expression, empowers artists, and enables music lovers to discover new wonders.” (read more) Art is timeless and storage should be decentralized and trust-less for art to persist. #SongsOfDigitalFreedom

Grant amount: DAI 10k (in BZZ)

MemeZzz

the MemeZzz project was already part of the first grant wave, as well as the first to reach its milestone, a meme generator on Swarm (https://github.com/igar1991/memez-swarm). In the second stage of grants, based on the meme generator, the project continues its path into becoming an entertainment platform. The result is an entertainment platform where users can store, publish and view memes that are saved in Swarm and aligned with fair data society principles.

Grant amount: DAI 2900 (in BZZ)

Ready Fighter One

Ready Fighter One wants to take real boxing to the virtual world, starting with a mini-app that connects to the Fairdrive personal data store. In their words: “We would like to create a small yet powerful container for personal health data storage. We would like to create an open, email-less login so that you only need an ETH address to jump into the platform and start generating data. This data is yours, with a common structure to export or take it to other apps.”

As Fairdrive is an ecosystem personal data store, kickstarted and supported by yours truly Swarm with the goal of facilitating data interoperability and data sovereignty across the wider ecosystem, this one surely adds to the punch. Bad pun. Blame it on Christmas punch.

Grant amount: DAI 8k (in BZZ)

Grassroots Economics

Grassroots Economics is a non-profit foundation that seeks to empower marginalized communities to take charge of their own livelihoods and economic future. They focus on community development through economic empowerment and community currency programs with the goal of improving the lives of the most vulnerable. This sounds awesome because it just is and this is why we had already supported them in their gitcoin grant (Twitter). We are happy to take it to the next level. As part of this grant, the GE team will look into how to save user metadata to Swarm, also resulting in new tools for other devs.

Grant amount: DAI 10k (in BZZ)

Embedded Swarm on RISC-V

This grant application doesn’t need a long description as there’s truth in the “there are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don’t” meme. For the 1 in 10, here’s a summary:

• A minimal Swarm node implementation targeting IoT devices using the RISC-V instruction set.
• Perform a Swarm node handshake from a qemu hive rev b vm https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive1-rev-b
• RISC-V is the one and only open-source, rentier-free instruction set architecture, eg: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/risc-v-what-it-is-and-what-benefits-it-can-provide-to-your-organization/

For the other half… Imagine Swarm in every fridge, TV, or IoT device. Let the smallness of the solution not fool you as to how big the impact is.

Grant amount: DAI 10k (in BZZ)

Decentral.Community Workshops 2021 — Workshop series for privacy-centric technologies and data sovereignty with Swarm

The Critical Decentralization Cluster (CDC) is an initiative started by RIAT and the Monero Community and is an infrastructure which had been deployed at the Chaos Communication Congress (most recently in 2019; see https://decentral.community/about/ ). Moreover, it has become the home and central point of the CCC experience for crypto-minded visitors.

Because of COVID, the endeavors have been decentralized. Throughout 2021, the CDC wants to further decentralize the programme throughout the year with decentral workshops and a diverse programme. For the Swarm grants, CDC will develop “Workshops for privacy-centric technologies and data sovereignty with Swarm”, which are open-source, accessible, and remote. We want to encourage people to understand, envision and create privacy-centric applications around Swarm.

We really hope we can meet soon again at CDC!

Grant amount: DAI 7k (in BZZ)

Minerva — Digital Wallet

Minerva is a GPL-licensed mobile wallet that makes the handling of crypto assets and self-sovereign identity easy and accessible. It is a gateway for your decentralized application to offer open human-centric decentralized identities for people, organizations and machines. With this grant Minerva wants to take the first step towards Swarm integration by using it for backup and recovery. Data interoperability, FTW!

Grant amount: DAI 10k (in BZZ)

Atelier Ludensis

Internally, we were sure that it is merely a question of time before a connection is made between NFTs and Swarm; after all, for a truly unstoppable NFT you need unstoppable storage, don’t ya? Atelier Ludensis is planning to put the grant to good use to make a step towards such a solution by developing a Proof of Concept to link NFT streaming content via a semantic web-based multi-dimensional UX, visually linking the NFTs to relevant semantic nodes. Will there be a new ERC?

Grant amount: DAI 10k (in BZZ)

EnergonX

EnergonX aims to build a fair hydrogen location-aware trading platform system that provides a set of easy-to-use and transparent services for all its members. It’s engineered from the ground up with security, efficiency, speed, and scalability in mind, built to high standards. Their current and unique geo-located matching trading engine is capable of 7,000 orders per second and they plan to go toward a fully permissionless trustless system using distributed ledger technology. EnergonX aims to use the grant to implement the storage and retrieval of Production Certificates and Guarantees Of Origin on Swarm. Clean energy is the new deal.

Grant amount: DAI 8k (in BZZ)

Back to the future…

This is it for this batch of grants. If you feel like all these awesome projects flew in from the future to show us what awaits us, you are not the only one! Together with Swarm launching 1.0 and seeing the first projects and teams dreaming up new solutions, all this is giving us wings into 2021. Join us!

The current grant call has been extended until 8 February, apply here: https://swarmgrants.typeform.com/to/O3qL6VdO