swimchain.io
Peer-to-peer social protocol · mainnet live

A social network where attention is life support.

Swimchain has no servers — every reader is a node. Posting costs real computational work, so spam is expensive. And content that nobody engages with decays and disappears, on a 7-day half-life enforced by the protocol itself.

Get Swimchain Play in your browser Run a node
cs1qz6nm04erxrg0…j6wzk5 just now

First post from the open water. If you stop paying attention to me, I will sink. That is not a bug.

heat 100%

Live demo — this post decays like the real thing. Engagement resets the clock. See a real site built on it: The Daily Drift.

No install required

Try it in your browser, right now.

These run against the live mainnet — real chain, real proof-of-work, no account and nothing to download.

ReefGrow a coral reef on the chain. Every tile you place is a post; every reef breathes with engagement. ChessPlay chess where the games live on-chain — challenge the bot or another swimmer. Browse the networkA read-only window onto live mainnet spaces — see what's swimming before you dive in. The Daily DriftA serverless newspaper published straight from the chain — pages that survive only while read.
How it stays honest

Three laws instead of a landlord.

There is no company, no moderators-of-last-resort, no ad auction deciding what you see. The protocol replaces them with physics.

Argon2id · ~30s per post

Speech costs work.

Every post, reply, and reaction carries a memory-hard proof-of-work. One voice is cheap. A million fake ones are not. Nodes verify the work before a byte propagates.

7-day half-life · 4h if spam-flagged

Heat or death.

Engagement is warmth. Content nobody touches cools, sinks, and is pruned by every node in the network. Nothing accumulates except what people actively keep alive.

Ed25519 identity · sponsorship trees

No servers to seize.

Your identity is a keypair you hold. Your feed is assembled by your own node from peers. New identities enter by sponsorship, so reputation has roots — and consequences.

One chain, many shores

Every way you already talk, rebuilt without the middleman.

All clients speak the same protocol to your local node. The same post can be a forum thread, a chat message, and a feed item — decaying or thriving everywhere at once.

ForumLong-form threads and replies, Reddit-shaped, landlord-free.
ChatDiscord-style servers and channels over the same chain.
FeedA timeline built by your node, not an engagement auction.
WikiCollaborative pages where revisions live on-chain.
SearchFull-text search over everything your node has seen.
ArchiverSpend proof-of-work to keep content you value alive.
The TrenchA node-homestead game — your node is your lantern in the deep.
BridgePipe Matrix and IRC rooms onto the chain and back.
AnalyticsWatch spaces breathe: heat, decay, and engagement flows.

Forum, Chat, Feed, Search, Wiki, and The Trench ship in the desktop launcher today; Feed is the Android app. Archiver, Bridge, and Analytics live in the repo — build them from source against your own node.

Join the water

Your node is your account.

One binary. It keeps your keys, syncs the chain, serves every client, and helps carry the content you care about. Mainnet is live with public seeds — you'll find peers in seconds.

Runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. 1 CPU and 1 GB of RAM is plenty.

$ git clone https://github.com/superness/swimchain $ cd swimchain && cargo build --release $ ./target/release/sw identity create $ ./target/release/sw node start Node started · listening on 0.0.0.0:9735 Found 3 peers via seed · chain syncing…

Clients connect to your node's JSON-RPC on port 9736. See Developers for the full protocol.

Specified, not vibes

Thirteen specs. No trust required.

Every rule a node enforces is written down. If you disagree with the protocol, fork it — chain selection is a spec too.