Swarms

Swarms is free, open-source software for building teams of AI agents that work together. Kye Gomez made it, and his company is The Swarms Corporation. You will find it at swarms.ai and swarms.world. It is not the Swarm library from OpenAI, and it is not the Swarm storage network on Ethereum.

Swarms has two sides. The first is software for developers: a Python framework, a Rust version, and a paid cloud API. The second lives on Solana. It is a marketplace where people sell agents and prompts, some of them launched as tokens you can trade. There is also the SWARMS token, which the founder adopted in December 2024.

You can use the software and never touch the token.

How the Swarms AI agent framework works

Swarms lets a developer define single AI agents and then wire them into a team. Each agent is a language model with a prompt, a set of tools and a memory. The team structure decides who talks to whom and in what order.

The GitHub repository lists eight core structures. A sequential workflow passes work down a chain. A concurrent workflow runs agents side by side. A hierarchical swarm puts a director agent in charge of workers. A graph workflow lets you draw the routes yourself. The rest cover group chats, a mix of expert agents whose answers are merged, and a longer research routine.

Suppose you want a market report. One agent gathers sources, a second checks the numbers, a third writes the draft, and a director agent sends weak sections back. You describe that team in a few lines of Python and Swarms handles the hand-offs.

The Swarms documentation says the framework works with many model providers and is backwards compatible with LangChain, AutoGen and CrewAI. It supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a standard way to plug tools into agents, and x402, a protocol that lets an agent pay for a service in crypto.

The code is licensed under Apache-2.0. In early October 2026 the repository showed about 7,200 stars, 1,000 forks and more than 5,400 commits.

Swarms v16 OverClock, v15 Akira and Swarms Rust

Swarms shipped three big releases in the autumn of 2026. Each one changes what you get from the framework, and one of them breaks older code.

Version 15, called Akira, went live in early September 2026. The team's post on X called it a rebuild. Agents now load tools only when they need them, and a large amount of old code was cut.

Version 16, called OverClock, came out on 2 October 2026. The v16 release notes list these main additions:

• Token accounting, so each agent and team reports what a run cost.
• DecisionModel, which returns a clear choice with a confidence score in place of free text.
• MCPDeployer, which serves any agent as an MCP server with a login check.
• TreeOfThoughts, a way of reasoning that tries a few partial answers before it picks one.

The same notes own up to a bug that v16 fixes. Several team structures had been passing the last task's transcript into the next task. If you ran Swarms in live systems before v16, check your results. The release also breaks some older code. A failed model call now raises an error, where it used to return an empty answer.

Swarms Rust is a separate Rust version of the framework. It reached v0.3.0 on 29 September 2026. The Swarms-RS page claims it starts at least 130 times faster than the Python frameworks it was tested against. That is the project's own test. We found no outside test of it.

Swarms Cloud and API pricing: is Swarms AI free?

The Swarms framework is free and open source. The hosted Swarms API, which runs agents for you, is a paid service with a free tier.

The Swarms pricing page listed four plans in October 2026. The Free plan costs nothing a month and charges per use, with a limit of 100 requests a minute. Pro is $19.99 a month. Premium is $100 a month and raises the limit to 2,000 requests a minute. Enterprise pricing is custom. The homepage offers $5 in free credits at sign-up.

Usage is billed on top: $6.50 per million input tokens, $18.50 per million output tokens, and $0.01 per agent. A token here means a chunk of text sent to an AI model, not a crypto token.

So the real choice is between running the free framework on your own model keys and paying Swarms to host it. Swarms Cloud added a dashboard in September 2026 that shows each API request with its cost and full payload, plus an Auto Agent Builder that drafts a team of agents from a plain-language task.

The pricing page does not list the SWARMS token as a way to pay.

Swarms Marketplace: tokenized agents and prompts on Solana

The Swarms Marketplace is where people buy and sell agents, prompts, tools, MCP servers and skills. This is the part of Swarms that runs on Solana.

A seller has three ways to get paid, according to the marketplace page. The first is a plain sale. Swarms takes a flat 10% fee and the seller keeps 90%, whether the buyer pays by card through Stripe or in SOL.

The second is a tokenized launch. The listing gets its own token on Solana, sold along a bonding curve. That is a pricing rule that lifts the price as more people buy. The seller puts up no money and earns 0.5% of every trade in that token. A setting called Frenzy Mode doubles the seller's cut to 1%. Exchange Phemex reported in April 2026 that a launch can be priced in either USDC or SOL.

The third is a Vault. You get in by holding the listing's token, and there is no price to pay.

Here is what that means for a seller. Say a prompt's token sees $10,000 of trading in a day on the standard setting. Its creator earns $50. The token's price tells you little about how good the prompt is. The marketplace page does not say these tokens give you a share of ownership or revenue.

Swarms said on X on 29 September 2026 that the marketplace had passed 6,000 listings.

New features arrived through September 2026. Agents can now search and publish listings through a marketplace MCP server. A Quick Launch page cuts a token launch down to one short form. PromptScan, added on 1 October 2026, scans every prompt for hidden instructions.

SWARMS token: what the Swarms AI crypto coin does

SWARMS is a Solana token tied to the Swarms project by its founder. It was not issued through a planned sale. You can see live price and trading data on our SWARMS token page.

The token was minted on the Pump.fun launchpad in mid-December 2024. According to 1inch's token profile, it traded as an unclaimed meme coin for about two days before Kye Gomez adopted it in public. The supply is fixed at about 1 billion tokens, all in circulation, per CoinMarketCap.

CoinMarketCap describes SWARMS as used for governance, paying for agent services, and as a base currency for agent tokens. The pages we read on the project's own site show a narrower picture in October 2026. Marketplace sales settle by card or in SOL, tokenized launches are priced in SOL or USDC, and the cloud API is billed in dollars. The framework documentation does not mention the token at all.

In plain terms, you do not need SWARMS to build with Swarms, and the token's link to the software's revenue is not set out in any document we could find. We also found no primary source for how much of the supply the founder or team holds.

Who Swarms is for

Swarms suits Python or Rust developers who want many agent team structures in one library and are comfortable with frequent breaking changes. It also suits creators who want to sell prompts or agents and like the idea of earning trading fees.

It is a weaker fit in three cases. If you need a stable interface, note that Swarms shipped two major versions within about a month in 2026. If you only want a simple two-agent hand-off, a smaller library will be easier. If you are looking at SWARMS as a way to own a share of the business, the token does not give you that on any terms we could verify.

Teams that need compliance paperwork should ask for it directly. The Swarms homepage says the cloud is HIPAA compliant and ISO 27001 certified, and the pricing page lists SOC 2 on the Premium plan. The pages we read did not link the reports.

Is Swarms AI safe and legit? Risks to weigh

Swarms is a real, active software project. The code is public and new versions ship often. The risks sit around the token, the tokenized listings, and how much the project leans on one founder.

Nobody has shown how the SWARMS token was shared out. It was minted on a launchpad and adopted two days later. There is no published plan for who got what, and no lock-ups. 1inch's profile says the holdings of insiders from the launch are still not disclosed.

A lot rides on one person. 1inch's profile says the main risk is the founder's reputation. It points to past claims about his earlier code on GitHub. It also says the name clash with OpenAI's Swarm led to public legal threats.

We could not check the Solana programs. The Swarms pages we read do not give the addresses of the programs behind its token launches, and our listing has none on file. So we do not know who can change that code, or whether anyone has audited it.

Tokens for single agents and prompts trade in small markets. Each one starts on a bonding curve with little money behind it. The creator earns fees on every trade, whether or not the product is any good.

Prompts and skills written by strangers can hide harmful instructions. PromptScan is the project's answer, and it only launched on 1 October 2026.

The speed tests and uptime figures come from Swarms itself. They also differ. The documentation promises 99.9% uptime or better, while the homepage says 99%.

Swarms vs CrewAI, LangGraph and OpenAI Swarm

Swarms gives you many ready-made team shapes in one library, and it is the only one of these four with a crypto marketplace attached. The trade-off is pace. Swarms changes fast, so expect to update your code more often.

CrewAI sets agents up as a crew, each with a role and a goal. That is close to the director-and-workers shape in Swarms. LangGraph, from the LangChain team, treats a group of agents as a graph you draw step by step. Swarms put out a report in September 2026 that says its own graph engine runs about seven times faster than LangGraph on average. That is Swarms' own test, so weigh it as a claim.

OpenAI's Swarm only shares the name. OpenAI calls it an educational framework for trying out hand-offs between agents. AutoGen, from Microsoft, is one more choice.

Swarms says its framework is backwards compatible with LangChain, AutoGen and CrewAI. So you can try Swarms without throwing away agents you have already built.

Kye Gomez, The Swarms Corporation and project history

Kye Gomez created Swarms and runs The Swarms Corporation. The main Python code sits under his own GitHub account. The Rust version sits under the company's account.

The software came first. The SWARMS token followed in mid-December 2024. The main website is now swarms.ai, and the marketplace can still be reached at swarms.world.

The team now sells the whole set as the Swarms Stack. It covers the two frameworks, Swarms Cloud, the marketplace, and AgentHQ. AgentHQ is a control panel for agents, and the homepage marked it as pre-beta in October 2026.