Swarm is a decentralised storage and communication system for a sovereign digital society.

The system is economically self-sustaining due to a built-in incentive system enforced through smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. Users remain sovereign owners of their personal data in alignment with fair data principles. The architecture makes the system resilient to connectivity issues, node churn, or targeted DDOS attacks, and enables a zero-downtime service.

### Swarm exists so the internet can again be decentralised.

Swarm’s longer term vision is to become the operating system of the re-decentralised internet. It provides a scalable and self-sustaining infrastructure for a supply-chain economy of data.

#### Key Highlights

* **Unstoppable features for unstoppable dApps**: Privacy preservation, communication and redundancy are built in to ensure availability and continued data delivery even when individual nodes go offline. Any data, any device. On demand.

* **Radical data ownership and management**: Data is split up into small chunks that are stored throughout the network without vulnerable central hubs. Operators cannot know what content is stored on their nodes while still being paid for storing.

* **Enabling zero-cost economics**: No central party controls the data or can monetize it. Instead of relying on intermediaries to ensure the availability and integrity of data, all node operators participate in enabling a fair data economy.

Shifting the cost of access, hosting and execution to users removes the last obstacle to truly agile and adaptive application development to make web3 a reality.

### Tokenomics

BZZ is the Swarm Network’s native token. Users of the network’s services (i.e. bandwidth and storage) use it to compensate the providers, or node operators, for those services.

The network is designed to incentivise constructive behaviour. Node operators that provide more bandwidth and storage while quickly delivering popular chunks (files uploaded to Swarm are divided into 4 KB chunks) will get more traffic and consequently more rewards. Therefore, operators compete in providing high-quality services, which then grows, secures and maintains the network.

The token supply is not fixed and can increase or decrease via the bonding curve. You can read about Swarm’s bonding curve in detail [here](https://medium.com/ethereum-swarm/swarm-and-its-bzzaar-bonding-curve-ac2fa9889914). Put simply, if the supply goes up by one token, so does its price in the bonding curve contract, and vice versa. This makes BZZ neither inflationary nor deflationary in nature.

### Ecosystem

Having a vibrant ecosystem on top of Swarm is key. The Swarm Network already has a budding ecosystem growing on top of it. From decentralised marketplaces, art, NFTs, archives, to data stores, music streaming and everything in between is sprouting on Swarm. The Swarm Foundation actively supports this growth through grants.

Today’s cloud is still based on the concept of standalone computers, where data is stored and managed centrally on servers of trusted institutions. With the introduction of the BZZ token, Swarm is providing a key component to drive the transformation of the cloud as we know it. By collaborating with the web3 community, Swarm aims to create an autonomous system for storing information, private and unstoppable, for a digital self-sovereign society.