What is Swarm City?
Swarm City is a decentralized commerce project that is built on the Ethereum blockchain. It is a project that is designed to leverage the benefits of blockchain technology in the way people transact value, communicate and create a contextual reputation from their interactions.
The idea behind Swarm City is to bring forth a global marketplace that is open for service providers and services, all taking advantage of the benefits of the Ethereum project, currency tokens, encrypted communication tools, the Kovan testnet, and any other tools that might be available on the blockchain.
This project realizes that change is imminent in the way things are done online, and we are yet to see the ultimate changes. Therefore, it is built as a responsive project in that any new solutions that might be available down the line will be adaptable into Swarm City.
It is to make sure that buyers and sellers all over the world have direct access to one another, without the bottlenecks that are currently present in e-commerce.
Through Swarm City, users are able to access a network of P2P consumers and service providers.
Swarm City aims to make work easier for anyone who would like to create a unique branded marketplace (Storefront) and people who would like to make use of contributors who share a common goal with them (Hives).
In order to achieve this, Swarm City brings together open-source development, platform cooperation, blockchain technology, and a decentralized swarm organizational model, and makes it available to everyone.
Essentially, Swarm City is a decentralized swarm of people whose desire to change the world is so strong, and believe that this is possible through P2P interaction. Value on the Swarm City project is expressed in terms of SWT, an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain.
What is the problem that Swarm City Solves?
Swarm City is about freedom. The reason why Swarm City was built is to make sure that people would no longer have to worry about the interference of third parties in their interactions, whether for business or pure communication.
What has been able to achieve, is to get rid of all third parties from any transaction that is carried out in the project. This is a guarantee that the process will go on smoothly without obstruction.
By getting rid of third parties, Swarm City is able to reduce the cost of transactions.
Besides, there is no longer need for third parties in the system, whose function in a conventional system would have been to protect the personal data for users. On the Swarm City project, all data that is shared is protected.
Freedom has always been a challenge in the conventional world of doing business. This is because all data is stored on a centralized platform.
Therefore, someone somewhere always has access to all your data. Even data that is stored in an encrypted format is never safe as long as it is stored in a central place. Through Swarm City, however, this is different.
By creating decentralized apps on the Ethereum blockchain, these apps have the capacity to disrupt a lot of global industries and markets. Some of the markets that are already ripe for the taking include cybersecurity, banking, and payments, forecasting, the Internet of Things, networking and supply chain management.
Other industries that will benefit from the new revolution by blockchain projects like Swarm City include online music distribution, healthcare, legislative voting, charity, cloud storage, private transportation, insurance, real estate, retail, crowdfunding and so forth.
Basically, Swarm City will be useful for any industry or market that involves the use of transactions or data of some sort.
How does Swarm City Solve the problem?
In realization of the things that Swarm City needs to achieve, it would have been possible to build it on the Blockchain project or any other project, but Swarm City chose Ethereum, and for a good reason.
There are technical and philosophical components that were built for Swarm City, which form the conceptual framework upon which the project thrives.
Simply put, Swarm City is designed to make it easier for people to use marketplaces that are context specific, to engage in, or in cases where it is impossible to do so, allow them to create their own marketplaces unique for their context.
In Swarm City marketplaces are referred to as hashtags. Users are also able to create decentralized communities on Swarm City, which will help them in terms of economies of scale. At the same time, this will also help them create a good reputation for one another through marketplace transactions. The communities are referred to as hives.
What makes Swarm City better than the competitors?
There are several reasons why Swarm City is currently performing better than any other project that is designed in the same realm. The following are the key reasons:
Hashtags as Marketplaces
In the normal world goods and services are exchanged in a physical marketplace. This can either be in a shop or a local store. Things are different in Swarm City. Here, you will find goods and services inside the hashtags.
A hashtag is a marketplace that is specific for the particular context in question. Take for example the hashtag #needaride. This is a marketplace for ridesharing. In this context, drivers are able to get in touch with riders, getting them from one place to another.
The hashtag #contractor is specifically for homeowners, whereby they can get in touch with home improvement professionals like electricians, plumbers and so forth, to come and solve some of their concerns at home. What happens, in the long run, is that at the end of these transactions, users will earn a reputation by engaging in a transaction through a hashtag. This makes a significant difference in the long run.
Apart from that, users on Swarm City are free to create and operate marketplaces that suit their needs. This is as simple as creating a hashtag.
Like any other proprietorship, for example, running a shop, the person who creates a hashtag is held accountable for making sure that the marketplace in question is a conducive place for doing business.
This means that they need to ensure that everyone who comes aboard their hashtag, whether they are sellers or buyers, will be in a good position to have the experience of a lifetime. Should there arise any dispute in a given hashtag, it is up to the creator to solve it in an amicable manner.
Hives as Communities
Hives share a strong correlation with beehives. They are about people coming together, people who share resources and values.
Every single person in a given hive brings to the fold certain metrics in terms of their experience and genetical makeup. Since people have unique skills, a hive will, at any given point in time have a lot of professionals, and people from different walks of life, making it a good place to engage communities.
For this reason, therefore, the concept of a hive is useful for the members, as it allows them to come together and form a unique community that has all kinds of individuals in it.
By coming together, members of a hive are able to pool resources in terms of their ideas and skills. They learn from one another, and this helps them create a strong community that abides by certain set guidelines.
The idea of a hive is to bring together people who share resources and values and work together for the provision of services that they share in common. Using the example of rideshares, the drivers can create a hive. Once they create a hive of their own, this hive can be used to offer rides to riders inside a hashtag.
Every single driver in the hive earns a hive reputation whenever they provide rides to the hive members. Apart from that, the drivers contribute a very small percentage of their earnings to the shared resource pool of the hive.
For the drivers, this form of organization works well in their favor because as they earn hive reputations, they become authority figures in that community. Therefore, this also gives them more influence on the resource pool, and how it should be spent. Resource pools can be committed towards anything, from marketing to insurance, as long as the hive agrees on what they feel it is best suited for.
Value Proposition through Reputation
Transparency in an in-person commerce situation happens because both of the parties that are involved are able to physically see the form of payment and the goods, or can somehow tell the type of services that they are going to receive. Therefore, it is easier to interact.
However, there are also instances where people must interact and do business without ever knowing or seeing one another.
This can happen both online and in person. In such a situation, it is highly important to find a way of creating a level of trust, so that the participants are fully aware of the fact that the people they are dealing with are credible, and the transaction is also credible.
Users on Swarm City can create a contextual reputation by simply completing the transactions that they create within the hashtag. For example, on the #needaride hashtag, both the driver and the rider will earn a #needaride reputation when they complete the transaction.
For the user, you earn a reputation whenever you complete a transaction. The good thing about reputations is that they are forever embedded on your profile. The reputation is written on the blockchain, which makes it absolute and permanent.
Your profile will always show all the reputations you have earned in different hives and hashtags. As a result of this, anyone who is engaging you for the first time will have a rough idea of the type of things that you hold dear and the areas where you are competent.
How can Swarm City be categorized?
Swarm City is a decentralized e-commerce platform that allows people the ability to interact freely with one another, communicate and do business by taking advantage of blockchain technology. It is built in such a way that not even Swarm City can interfere with the interactions since they are on a voluntary basis.
What’s Swarm City’s vision on Security?
Swarm City is built on the Ethereum platform. Therefore, it enjoys the same security benefits that Ethereum projects do.
It is built with censorship resilience and resistance, so users never have to worry about interference by third parties like governments or other institutions.
Being an Ethereum project, Swarm City uses smart contracts. These are programs that are written to facilitate an exchange on an Ethereum blockchain. The contracts are written specifically to address certain terms and conditions of a contract. If these conditions are met, the contract will be automatically executed.
Another benefit of running smart contracts is that they are operated on a blockchain platform, which means that they are designed to run without any interference, fraud or censorship.
Examples of Swarm City use cases/applications
Users on Swarm City are able to do a lot of things. Entry into the Swarm City ecosystem is through the Swarm City Terminal. The following are some of the things that you can do once you are in Swarm City:
- Create a digital wallet
- Create your profile
- Send and receive SWT
- View your ETH and SWT balance
- View the USD equivalent of your balances in SWT
- Engage in a private conversation with someone
- Engage in and complete a transaction
- Receive Swarm City Reputation tokens (SWR) when you complete a transaction
With time, there is room for development and users can look forward to more intuitive features. At the click of a button, for example, they should be able to create a hashtag of their own. A hashtag, in this case, is simply a smart contract that creates a market with unique parameters.
Resources
https://coincheckup.com/coins/Swarm-City
https://medium.com/swarm-city-times https://support.swarm.city/knowledge_base/categories/frequently-asked-questions-76 https://github.com/swarmcity/sc-token/blob/master/token-exchange-miniwhitepaper.md#token-exchange-whitepaper%20https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9RSMdR2vWssV2JJX0t6dmN6SUk/view