This year has seen the Swarm project advancing at great pace towards launch, and Swarm Association is excited to announce a new round of grant recipients that will be taking the network to new places. The projects reflect the common endeavours towards a fair data economy and it is exciting to see this growing ecosystem establishing itself among enthusiasts.

What kind of projects are eligible to apply for a Swarm grant?

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

After receiving grant applications for 18 incredible projects, Swarm Association is pleased to announce the following 7 that will officially become a part of Swarm. Let’s get to it!

7energy

At the core of 7energy lies the collection and management of energy data. The system continuously collects electricity flow readings from so-called smart meters belonging to REC members (Renewable Energy Communities). This data is needed mainly for two purposes: a) accounting: a basis for calculating who owes how much to whom and b) optimisation: finding out the best ways to make the REC as a whole more effective. 7energy will use Swarm as a storage backend for this data, including its ability to enable fine-grained access control. This allows members to retain full autonomy and privacy while also working towards a suitable framework for RECs.

Grant amount: DAI 10,000 (in BZZ)

Dapplets

A permissionless, decentralised and unstoppable Platform MVP for Augmenting Applications (Dapplets) incl. some example Applications. Dapplets aims to leverage target websites’ search results to pull data previously uploaded to Swarm, providing an interface for data interchange between the Dapplet and the search result provider. All of these platform modules are stored on Swarm.

Grant amount: DAI 5,000 (in BZZ)

Open Social Network (OSM)

As we see an oligarchy in social media players who act in practice as the censors of our time, OSM proposes an alternative. By building on Swarm, OSM plans to (collaboratively) create this censorship-resistant, permissionless and decentralised social media platform. OSM will allow users to comment on posts, subscribe to other user feeds and temporarily store subscription lists and recent feeds on their own device. It will include other features and functions mirroring what are known today as the normal Web2 social media platforms, but in a censorship-resistant, data-monopoly-free manner.

Grant amount: DAI 3,000 (in BZZ)

SocialArchive

SocialArchive aims to detach the current social networks’ hold on our digital data being held in data silos under monopoly rule. SocialArchive will allow users to store their own data, giving them sovereignty to keep from and/or integrate with other services if they so wish — diminishing user dependence on the goodwill of their data maintainers to keep their data online and accessible. To keep this completely decentralised, SocialArchive will use Swarm to store users data through Fairdrive.

Grant amount: DAI 8,000 (in BZZ)

BrainTrip

Records of brain waves form an important part of a person’s electronic health record, as they are a facet of a basic function of the body and mental state. BrainTrip brings ownership of individuals’ medical records back into their own hands, opening up new possibilities to different services as individuals’ data is easily available and transferable. This allows for deeper possibilities of analysis and medical insight, as well as a sense of autonomy. BrainTrip’s goal is to offer a decentralised screening solution through Fairdrive, making it the main system for storing EEG data.

Grant amount: DAI 10,000 (in BZZ)

Digital Rights Services (DRS)

The open source Corda blockchain, built by the global banking sector, is suitable for digital rights management, administration and verification. It provides rights owners (label) with the required compliance they need, resulting in real-time insights and royalty payments. Currently, DRS has a prototype running with multiple Corda nodes and all current nodes run on their Azure environment. For the next stage, DRS wants to make it easy for copyright owners (like labels and publishers) to host their own nodes on Ethereum Swarm by facilitating the process through, for example, a plug-and-play toggle in their Settings.

Grant amount: DAI 10,000 (in BZZ)

Laibach X Swarm Decentralisation of art

After decades of pushing the boundaries of the art and music industry as a cult band, Laibach is venturing into the world of blockchain with a bang. Laibach is known for openly challenging totalitarian regimes through their style and lyrics — from fascism and socialism to global tension points such as Wikileaks (their song Whistleblowers even became its anthem), the Arab Spring, the Euro’s instability, and many more. By producing NFTs, the band is launching a social experiment that tackles the question of possibility in decentralised art, understanding it as a new form of creativity and playful interaction within a closed society. Swarm’s decentralisation project is key to establishing the first ever fully decentralised operational system that could revolutionise the way art is consumed and exchanged.

Grant amount: DAI 7,000 (in BZZ)

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This wraps up the third batch of grants. Swarm Association is very excited about the growing number of projects and ideas being presented, reinforcing Swarm’s commitment to decentralisation and getting closer and closer to a fair data economy. As Fair Data Society principles permeate all aspects of Swarm and grantees building on Swarm share the same philosophy, these values are naturally extended to the hands of average users.

Swarm’s project ecosystem is growing fast and things could not look brighter. Please follow future blog posts and social media channels for announcements of the next wave of grant recipients!