TL;DR
Bee Beta contains the required features to build rich applications on top of Swarm. This release adds:
- Bandwidth incentives (on the Görli test network) are enabled by default
- Zero-leak messaging (Pss)
- External signer support (Clef)
- Improved sync and download performance
- Breaking changes on protocol level (TL;DR - just update your nodes)
We invite you to try it out and get in touch at our BeeHive or Telegram.
Milestone
Bee's third release marks a major milestone of the Bee project; we believe that developers can now unleash rich applications over Swarm with a good balance of performance and security. We understand that as the Swarm ecosystem develops, developers might need access to low-level APIs in order to develop a rich application experience, we therefore also offer a set of low-level APIs that allow you to interact with the Swarm network in your own, custom way.
We invite you to use our APIs. Your feedback would be beneficial for us to further improve them in the future.
Breaking changes
Several breaking changes were introduced with this version. You are advised to update your nodes promptly.
Bandwidth incentives
Bee Beta contains the basis for the Swarm bandwidth incentives. You will now earn gBZZ (Görli BZZ) by running your Swarm node.
Conversely, you are required to pay with gBZZ in order to upload and download content. You can get gBZZ at our faucet - check our documentation on how to fund your node's chequebook.
Zero-leak messaging
Bee Beta releases the second iteration of Pss (Postage service over swarm). Pss is zero-leak messaging over Swarm that allows for confidential, anonymous and untraceable node-to-node communication. Pss comes with a websocket API that allows clients to send a message to a recipient on an overlay address as well as to subscribe to a topic and receive messages.
External signer
Bee now supports an external signer (Clef) for security reasons to allow private keys not to be exposed to client process.
Speed improvements
Uploading and downloading data to Bee is now significantly more performant than it used to be(e).
Documentation
All new features are documented in our documentation.
Get in touch
As mentioned, we invite you to start building your applications on top of Swarm. We welcome discussions and collaborations. Get in touch with us via Telegram or the Beehive.