Swarm and Filecoin, newcomer and leader, who will be better in the distributed storage race?

As a member of the original Ethereum ecosystem, Swarm is an official part of the Ethereum project. It is mainly invested and developed by the Ethereum Foundation and uses different protocols and technologies in the Ethereum blockchain. It allows cloud pool storage, bandwidth and computing resources to support applications based on the Ethereum network.

FIL is the token of IPFS. IPFS is a peer-to-peer distributed file system. IPFS is a single bittorrent cluster that uses git distributed, decentralized storage. IPFS generates addresses based on content, and it provides a high-throughput content-addressed storage model. IPFS mainly builds a version file system through the Merkle tree data structure. IPFS does not have a single point of failure, and nodes do not need to trust each other.

From the perspective of positioning, Swarm has been designed to solve the problems that Ethereum will encounter in the future since its inception. However, since Swarm is built on the basis of Ethereum and will take over all the resources of Ethereum, it will develop very quickly. Backed by the big tree of Ethereum, Swarm is likely to catch up with Filecoin. IPFS/Filecoin is the definition of Web3.0. Since IPFS was launched by Protocol Labs in 2015, it has quickly gained the favor of blockchain participants. Its incentive layer Filecoin mining was launched in 2017, which further accelerated the promotion of the IPFS protocol in the network and made IPFS shoulder the heavy responsibility of rebuilding the data storage Web3.0.

Like IPFS, Swarm implements key-based routing (applied to a shared address space of node IDs and content hashes) based on XOR log distance, but Swarm uses a hybrid transport/forwarding style instead of relying on Kademlia. Swarm is a larger pool of peers, with iterative search and filtering performed by the request initiator, outsourcing the continuous search phase using only a smaller pool of active connections for iteration.

Filecoin’s unique certification system ensures the stable and efficient operation of the market, and users can verify that storage service providers on the network are storing their data correctly in accordance with their contracts. Filecoin storage verification is the glue that unifies the market, providing security for each user and allowing all storage service providers to store their data in accordance with regulations and ensure the integrity of all data stored on the network.

The two also have different reward mechanisms.

Swarm's incentive mechanisms fall into three categories:

1. Bandwidth incentives. Swarm uses bandwidth incentives to build trust relationships to exchange bandwidth and promote the upload and download of data. When Bee nodes communicate with each other to promote private and secure uploads of content, they maintain scores for consumed and received bandwidth.

2. Discovery rewards. Swarm’s discovery incentives are indirect, and it is in the interest of every node to have a well-connected Swarm network. For example: when new Bee nodes appear, they will connect to existing Bee nodes. The number of connections on a Bee node is expressed in the form of a “connection level”. When that node connects to another node, it also communicates its connection level, and then another (older) node can recommend new connections for it to improve the new node’s connection level.

3. Storage rewards. Swarm’s storage space is limited by the sum of the storage contributions of all individual nodes to the network, and storage incentives are set to ensure fair compensation for storers.

Filecoin uses block rewards. In the storage market, Filecoin storage service providers receive block rewards based on their storage capacity. Storage capacity is measured by how many units of effective storage space a storage service provider provides in the Filecoin network and how long it can be stored. The storage capacity of a storage service provider in the Filecoin network is equivalent to the computing power in the Bitcoin network. The block rewards received by a storage service provider depend on the proportion of its storage capacity to the total storage capacity of the entire network.