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The last six months were a period of steady growth for the Swarm network driven by the raise in the price of storage in late February of this year along with the ongoing efforts of Swarm ecosystem developers. In the early stages of the storage incentives rollout, the price of postage stamps batches used to pay for storage were set to the negligibly low level of 4 PLUR/chunk/block (1 PLUR = 1e-16 BZZ). In late February, [the price was increased](https://blog.ethswarm.org/foundation/2023/postage-stamp-price-increases-as-swarm-network-reaches-milestone-of-self-sustainability/) by several orders of magnitude to 24,000 PLUR/chunk/block. The new price meant that rewards for providing storage now had significant financial value, which served as the incentive for new node operators to join the Swarm and share their storage with the network.

Over the same period of time, the Bee dev team has been working on updates focused on increasing the performance and reliability of the network. Their work culminated in the release of [Bee 1.17.0](https://blog.ethswarm.org/foundation/2023/bee-1.17-paves-the-way-for-the-future-of-swarm/), in which Swarm's local storage (a vital component of the client), was re-written from the ground up for better performance and maintainability. In addition to the improved network performance, this update also laid a strong foundation for the future development of Bee, as the refactoring will allow for more rapid development of future Bee client features. The 1.17.0 update represents a commitment to the future development of Bee and the Swarm network.

Concurrent to the development of the Bee client, work has also been ongoing for vital Swarm ecosystem apps like [Swarm Desktop](https://github.com/ethersphere/swarm-desktop) and [Bee Dashboard](https://github.com/ethersphere/bee-dashboard), and also tools for developers and node operators such as [Swarm CLI](https://github.com/ethersphere/swarm-cli) and [Bee JS](https://github.com/ethersphere/bee-js), just to [name a few](https://hackmd.io/@noahniuwa/rkvEKrcan).

## A Look at the Numbers

With with the storage price increase and the ongoing updates to the Bee client and other Swarm ecosystem software, it's no surprise that this last six months has been a period of growth for the Swarm network. Let's take a closer look at some of these numbers:

First let's take a look at the total amount of BZZ rewarded across the whole network each month:


Here we can see a steady growth in the amount of BZZ rewarded to Bee nodes over the last six months followed by a rapid increase during the late summer months. BZZ rewarded per month can also give us insight into the usage of the network. Since the rewards paid out to node operators come from the redistribution of BZZ paid for storage, the increase in BZZ also corresponds to an increase in the amount of storage purchased each month.

Next let's take a look at the total number of nodes rewarded each month:


Here again we see a similar trend to that of the total BZZ rewarded per month — steady growth followed by a rapid increase in late summer. We can use this as a measure of growth of the node operator ecosystem as checking whether or not a node was rewarded over a month is a reasonable heuristic for measuring whether or not the node is an active participant as a storage provider in the Swarm network.

Next let's take a look at the median amount BZZ won per win event for storage provider nodes:


The median BZZ won again follows the same trend of our last two charts — steady growth followed by a rapid increase. This figure is useful for understanding the relationship between our first two charts. As the total amount of BZZ paid for storage is redistributed to all storage provider nodes, this figure represents the relationship between the number of participating storage provider nodes and the total BZZ paid for storage each month. This shows Swarm's self sustaining economic system at work — as more BZZ gets paid for storage, staking becomes more attractive to new participants, and as new participants join the network, the level of rewards will decrease until an equilibrium is reached.

## Looking Towards the Future

It has been wonderful to witness the growth of the Swarm network, and as the network performance and software ecosystem grows, we anticipate the continuation of this trend. With the core storage component of the network functioning smoothly, we're now ready to turn our attention to improving node operator, developer, and end user experiences. Node operators can look forward to improved logging, better tools for operating and managing nodes (especially for multi-node setups), while developers will be happy to see new features being added to existing tools like Bee JS and the others mentioned above. End users can look forward to improved UX on Swarm Desktop which makes it easier for anyone to use, regardless of their familiarity with Swarm.

This is a period of significant growth for both the Swarm network and the greater Swarm ecosystem, and we can't wait to see what comes next!