2026-05-09 –, Sladkovský Stage
Swarm enables a spectrum of decentralized storage products—from free self-hosting, through caching, to high-availability, low-latency delivery. This talk explores how protocol-level primitives and tooling combine to create distinct service tiers, offering a practical on-ramp from Web2-style usage to fully decentralized infrastructure.
Not all storage is the same. Users and applications require different guarantees across persistence, availability, and latency.
This talk introduces a product-tier view of decentralized storage on Swarm, showing how a single protocol can support multiple service levels:
• Free tier: upload to network cache
• Self-hosting: locally pinned content with access through host and secondary address
• Multinode hosting: locally pinned multi-neighbourhood storage
• Pinned content: decentralised pinning service by a balanced set of incentivised peers with access through closest node to secondary address
• Durable cold storage: incentivised reconstruction (scan n repair)
• Hot storage: postage stamp and redistribution game incentives, high availability through opportunistic caching
• Streaming: low-latency retrieval with direct broadcast
We will examine the protocol primitives that make these tiers possible—postage stamps, bandwidth incentives, erasure coding, caching behavior, and neighborhood topology, etc.
We show how these tiers provide a gradual on-ramp into Web3, allowing users to start without tokens and progressively opt into stronger guarantees as needed. The takeaway message is that decentralized storage should not be a single monolithic offering, but a layered product space—mirroring, and ultimately replacing, the spectrum of centralized cloud services.
Viktor Trón is the founder of Ethereum Swarm and President of the Swarm Foundation. He has spent over a decade building decentralized storage and communication infrastructure aimed at enabling a truly serverless web.