Swarm Network has reaffirmed its mission to build a protocol that verifies truth and exposes misinformation, a foundation for making data verifiable, private, and programmable.

The project’s latest update outlines how Swarm’s architecture has evolved beyond a typical Web3 layer to become a base protocol for privacy-preserving and AI-enabled data verification.

A persistent oracle problem in Web3

Despite major progress in decentralized finance, fewer than 1% of genuine Web3 use cases are active. Swarm attributes this to a core infrastructure gap, i.e., the lack of reliable connectivity between blockchains and the real world.

Traditional oracles still depend on delayed dispute resolution and human arbitration, often taking hours or days to confirm events. Many also struggle with privacy, scalability, and security, introducing single points of failure through centralized data relays or low-security committees.

This structural fragility limits innovation in areas such as event-driven DeFi and confidential prediction markets, where data must be both trustworthy and private.

Swarm’s privacy-preserving oracle architecture

Swarm Network’s model introduces user-owned agent swarms that can securely bring arbitrary and private data on-chain in real time.

This architecture makes Swarm the first privacy-preserving AI-powered oracle layer, allowing smart contracts to process real-world data privately and autonomously. Swarm’s distributed agents cross-validate claims using cryptographic verification, ensuring faster, more scalable results. 

This approach turns smart contracts from passive executors into adaptive systems capable of reasoning about real-world events while maintaining data confidentiality.

New use cases enabled by Swarm

Swarm’s infrastructure supports several new categories of onchain applications:

• Autonomous smart contracts: Agreements can respond to external events, such as policy changes and network outages, without waiting for centralized confirmation;
• Automated insurance settlement: Policies can self-execute once zero-knowledge–verified conditions are met, such as confirmed medical results or travel delays;
• Private data and prediction markets: Participants can trade on verified but non-public datasets, including internal research or institutional data, transforming information into a programmable, verifiable asset.

Market context and positioning

The convergence of blockchain, AI, and decentralized finance provides the backdrop for Swarm’s focus:

• The blockchain oracle market is forecast to reach $10.18 billion;
  The AI agents market is expected to grow to $13.5 billion;
• DeFi currently holds over $147 billion in locked assets but remains limited by data access.
  

Within this landscape, Swarm Network positions itself as the only protocol that unites privacy, AI verification, and oracle infrastructure into a single, scalable layer.

Focus on protocol development

Swarm’s next phase will concentrate on finalizing its core protocol layer. To accelerate this, the team will pause secondary initiatives and channel efforts into foundational development.

While Rollup.News has surpassed 128,000 verifiers and over 3 million verifications, product updates will be paused temporarily as the network transitions to its next stage.

Current priorities include:

• Scaling the Agent Builder for mass event verification;
  Expanding the Panel of Judges and Atomic-Claims Pipelines;
• Integrating private and institutional datasets to enable verifiable, privacy-preserving data streams.

Moving beyond the one-percent barrier

Swarm emphasizes that it is not changing direction but refining focus. The next phase of Web3, it argues, requires infrastructure that can verify off-chain reality in a trustless way while keeping data private and actionable.

If successful, Swarm Network believes smart contracts will evolve to respond to blockchain events and to real-world conditions, unlocking 99% of the valuable data currently siloed behind privacy and institutional barriers.

Swarm’s goal is to make truth programmable and accessible across the decentralized economy.

Featured image via Shutterstock.