Swap, Swear and Swindle Swarm Incentivisation
Duration: 00:20:05
Speaker: Viktor Tron, Aron Fischer
Type: Talk
Expertise: Advanced
Event: Devcon
Date: Jul 2026
Swap, Swear and Swindle. Swarm Incentivisation A robust peer-to-peer content storage and retrieval system requires a careful balance between the needs of the service providers and those of the consumers. The Swarm network is uniquely able to address these needs due to the new opportunities ethereum offers in the form of micro payments and smart-contract governed incentive schemes. In this talk we want to introduce the swarm incentive system. It is built around three pillars which we call Swap, Swear and Swindle. The Swap system accounts for bandwidth usage and compensates nodes for serving up content. The dynamics of this system suggest that popular content will automatically become more widely distributed and faster to access. Micropayments are handled by a custom chequebook smart contract and we are actively looking to integrate full payment channels as well. The Swear contracts deal with long term storage, allowing nodes to sell access to their storage capacity while allowing others to reliably store their content on swarm for extended periods of time. Finally, the Swindle contracts constitute a litigation engine to resolve disputes. The properties of Swindle make it a natural candidate to be a state-channel judge contract and we will present our research into off-chain state-channels for proofs-of-custody, recurring payments as well as litigation and conflict resolution. Swarm thus touches upon multiple strands of research currently happening in and around the ethereum ecosystem and unifies them in a coherent narrative that we hope to convey in this talk.
