Six months have passed since the launch of the "Swarmonomics" research programme. While we've always kept everyone appraised of our progress through our monthly progress reports shared in the Swarm Discord, it's now time to take a breath and consider the programme again from afar: what have we achieved, how does it link in to what we originally set out to do, how have our priorities shifted as new information came into view? And how does that set us up for the next six months?

• As a first step to getting insights into the state of the Swarm staker population, we built our stake transparency dashboard and associated staking API, showing stake vital statistics such as TVL and mapping out the stake that belongs to nodes thought to be active (as measured by participation in the reward sharing mechanism). You can check it out at https://beta.dash.swarm.shtuka.io.

  As well as informing research, a goal of the dashboard is to help infrastructure operators have access to the information they need to make investment decisions. However, we soon found that since stake cannot be withdrawn, node operators aren't that interested in pursuing more sophisticated stake strategies.

• Study staker strategies from risk perspective. After building our stake dashboard and talking with node operators, we found that NOs are very hesitant to deposit stake. From a risk management perspective, this is hardly surprising. Because of the twin risks of:

  • No way to recover the investment other than waiting for a highly uncertain revenue stream to cover the principal;

  • Exposure to hard-to-predict external factors like changes in subsidy programmes and the actions of other stakers in your neighbourhood

  we must acknowledge that in its current form, scaling a Swarm stake investment is not a very attractive opportunity. As it stands, it's likely to be of interest only to larger, more sophisticated entities; except that at the network's current scale, the capacity is too small for them too. So what do we do?

• Develop proposals for managing stake. We engaged with Swarm Research and achieved what looks like strong preliminary support for enabling withdrawals of stake positions in general. According to our assessment of node operator incentives — and supported by the results of a poll of actual node operators — this could lead to an immediate boost in TVL. We have two SWIPs (40 and 41) in the pipeline to unlock this change.

The opening paragraphs of our research programme statement promises the following things:

1. Develop a principled, objectives-based approach to protocol and parameter upgrades;

2. Improve transparency by gathering and publishing econometric data;

3. Investigate the construction of novel financial primitives based on the Swarm Network economy.

Our stake transparency dashboard is our answer to (2). As a guide to future development on transparency, and a way of thinking about which metrics to publish, we also shared a research memo that sketches a theory of value for BZZ.

We haven't started on (3) — that's more of a long-term research programme, and we find other priorities are more pressing.

Delivering part (1) is top of the agenda for the next six months: we're going to work towards building a roadmap and linking our recommendations for protocol improvement to that roadmap. See below.

In our original announcement, we also posed some open questions to which we're now, thanks to our research, able to provide partial answers:

How competitive is the Swarm node market?

Prior to the start of this programme, we saw no evidence that any node operators engaged in "strategic" behaviour. Virutally all nodes simply deposited the minimum balance of 10 BZZ and took no further action. But over the course of the past six months, the situation has changed: Swarm staking has shown the first signs of "stake matching" behaviour. According to our stake transparency dashboard, some node operators have increased their stake to 40 BZZ per neighbourhood — well past the minimum — presumably in a bid to increase their market share. Other nodes in the same neighbourhood responded by matching their 40 BZZ, bringing the market shares back to an even split.

Is the Swarm storage market liquid enough to respond to demand spikes? Is the price quoting mechanism responsive enough to signal that more supply is needed in a timely manner?

Although we haven't seen any notable demand spikes over the past half year, a supply trough did occur, leaving all neighbourhoods under-replicated. Despite the price oracle kicking in and rapidly marking up the storage price, the undersupply persisted for over three weeks. By not jumping in to participate, node operators leave fee money on the table, indicating a lack of elasticity in the Swarm storage supply chain.

We've also carried out some regression studies (as yet unpublished) that appear to confirm the same thing: the observable effect of storage price on Swarm node supply is miniscule. We expect that structural factors such as the complexity of staking and general interest in Swarm revenue are far more significant factors in determining supply.

Are BZZ or storage price fluctuations scaring off potential users? What can devs do to further stabilise the pricing UX?

Probably, but there isn't enough data to confirm this empirically. Anecdotally, the storage price fluctuations and the uncertainty surrounding batch expiry causes difficulties for developers building on Swarm. We'll be looking into ways to stabilise pricing over the coming months.

Over the next few months, our main priority is to develop recommendations for Swarm's economic roadmap for 2026 and beyond. That includes issues like staking, tokenomics, and quoting. We'll also carry on working on shipping SWIPs already in the pipeline.

• Ship withdrawals. It's pretty clear by now that whatever else ends up on the Swarm economy roadmap, enabling stake withdrawals will be near the top of the list. We'll finish tweaking the parameters, evaluate whether it ought to be bundled with other upgrades or shipped as a standalone, and hit send.

• Scale staking. We'll research designs that mitigate or eliminate stake fragmentation and scale what a node operator can do with one node and one wallet. Begin research into separating the roles of operations from capital: that is, give BZZ investors a way to hand their tokens to a professional operator in exchange as part of a loan or profit sharing arrangement.

• Reevaluate price quoting. There is currently little evidence that the price adjustment mechanism has its intended effect of stabilising supply. At the same time, it worsens UX for users by making prices and batch expiry uncertain, and can leave prices at a very high point, presumably scaring off potential customers. We want to find an easy-to-implement, practical way to make Swarm price quoting UX easier to understand and more stable for storage customers, and ship it fast.

• Explore protocol upgrade UX. The current UX surrounding protocol changes and migrations for protocol developers, client teams, and users alike presents serious challenges. We'll explore ways to make the experience more reliable and frictionless for users without sacrificing ownership or security.

We're still in the process of aligning with Swarm Research on how best to collaborate over the coming six months. We want to ensure that our recommendations are as relevant as possible to Swarm core team strategy and have opportunities to impact the official roadmap. Watch this space.

Six months have passed since the launch of the "Swarmonomics" research programme. While we've always kept everyone appraised of our progress through our monthly progress reports shared in the Swarm Discord, it's now time to take a breath and consider the programme again from afar: what have we achieved, how does it link in to what we originally set out to do, how have our priorities shifted as new information came into view? And how does that set us up for the next six months?

• As a first step to getting insights into the state of the Swarm staker population, we built our stake transparency dashboard and associated staking API, showing stake vital statistics such as TVL and mapping out the stake that belongs to nodes thought to be active (as measured by participation in the reward sharing mechanism). You can check it out at https://beta.dash.swarm.shtuka.io.

  As well as informing research, a goal of the dashboard is to help infrastructure operators have access to the information they need to make investment decisions. However, we soon found that since stake cannot be withdrawn, node operators aren't that interested in pursuing more sophisticated stake strategies.

• Study staker strategies from risk perspective. After building our stake dashboard and talking with node operators, we found that NOs are very hesitant to deposit stake. From a risk management perspective, this is hardly surprising. Because of the twin risks of:

  • No way to recover the investment other than waiting for a highly uncertain revenue stream to cover the principal;

  • Exposure to hard-to-predict external factors like changes in subsidy programmes and the actions of other stakers in your neighbourhood

  we must acknowledge that in its current form, scaling a Swarm stake investment is not a very attractive opportunity. As it stands, it's likely to be of interest only to larger, more sophisticated entities; except that at the network's current scale, the capacity is too small for them too. So what do we do?

• Develop proposals for managing stake. We engaged with Swarm Research and achieved what looks like strong preliminary support for enabling withdrawals of stake positions in general. According to our assessment of node operator incentives — and supported by the results of a poll of actual node operators — this could lead to an immediate boost in TVL. We have two SWIPs (40 and 41) in the pipeline to unlock this change.

The opening paragraphs of our research programme statement promises the following things:

1. Develop a principled, objectives-based approach to protocol and parameter upgrades;

2. Improve transparency by gathering and publishing econometric data;

3. Investigate the construction of novel financial primitives based on the Swarm Network economy.

Our stake transparency dashboard is our answer to (2). As a guide to future development on transparency, and a way of thinking about which metrics to publish, we also shared a research memo that sketches a theory of value for BZZ.

We haven't started on (3) — that's more of a long-term research programme, and we find other priorities are more pressing.

Delivering part (1) is top of the agenda for the next six months: we're going to work towards building a roadmap and linking our recommendations for protocol improvement to that roadmap. See below.

In our original announcement, we also posed some open questions to which we're now, thanks to our research, able to provide partial answers:

How competitive is the Swarm node market?

Prior to the start of this programme, we saw no evidence that any node operators engaged in "strategic" behaviour. Virutally all nodes simply deposited the minimum balance of 10 BZZ and took no further action. But over the course of the past six months, the situation has changed: Swarm staking has shown the first signs of "stake matching" behaviour. According to our stake transparency dashboard, some node operators have increased their stake to 40 BZZ per neighbourhood — well past the minimum — presumably in a bid to increase their market share. Other nodes in the same neighbourhood responded by matching their 40 BZZ, bringing the market shares back to an even split.

Is the Swarm storage market liquid enough to respond to demand spikes? Is the price quoting mechanism responsive enough to signal that more supply is needed in a timely manner?

Although we haven't seen any notable demand spikes over the past half year, a supply trough did occur, leaving all neighbourhoods under-replicated. Despite the price oracle kicking in and rapidly marking up the storage price, the undersupply persisted for over three weeks. By not jumping in to participate, node operators leave fee money on the table, indicating a lack of elasticity in the Swarm storage supply chain.

We've also carried out some regression studies (as yet unpublished) that appear to confirm the same thing: the observable effect of storage price on Swarm node supply is miniscule. We expect that structural factors such as the complexity of staking and general interest in Swarm revenue are far more significant factors in determining supply.

Are BZZ or storage price fluctuations scaring off potential users? What can devs do to further stabilise the pricing UX?

Probably, but there isn't enough data to confirm this empirically. Anecdotally, the storage price fluctuations and the uncertainty surrounding batch expiry causes difficulties for developers building on Swarm. We'll be looking into ways to stabilise pricing over the coming months.

Over the next few months, our main priority is to develop recommendations for Swarm's economic roadmap for 2026 and beyond. That includes issues like staking, tokenomics, and quoting. We'll also carry on working on shipping SWIPs already in the pipeline.

• Ship withdrawals. It's pretty clear by now that whatever else ends up on the Swarm economy roadmap, enabling stake withdrawals will be near the top of the list. We'll finish tweaking the parameters, evaluate whether it ought to be bundled with other upgrades or shipped as a standalone, and hit send.

• Scale staking. We'll research designs that mitigate or eliminate stake fragmentation and scale what a node operator can do with one node and one wallet. Begin research into separating the roles of operations from capital: that is, give BZZ investors a way to hand their tokens to a professional operator in exchange as part of a loan or profit sharing arrangement.

• Reevaluate price quoting. There is currently little evidence that the price adjustment mechanism has its intended effect of stabilising supply. At the same time, it worsens UX for users by making prices and batch expiry uncertain, and can leave prices at a very high point, presumably scaring off potential customers. We want to find an easy-to-implement, practical way to make Swarm price quoting UX easier to understand and more stable for storage customers, and ship it fast.

• Explore protocol upgrade UX. The current UX surrounding protocol changes and migrations for protocol developers, client teams, and users alike presents serious challenges. We'll explore ways to make the experience more reliable and frictionless for users without sacrificing ownership or security.

We're still in the process of aligning with Swarm Research on how best to collaborate over the coming six months. We want to ensure that our recommendations are as relevant as possible to Swarm core team strategy and have opportunities to impact the official roadmap. Watch this space.