eXeem was a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing client using the BitTorrent protocol. eXeem was designed to replace the need for centralized trackers (servers which co-ordinate the transfer of metadata across a BitTorrent network). It largely failed to achieve this goal, and the project was canceled and eXeem's network was shut down by the end of 2005. eXeem was written in C++ using the open source libtorrent library for its BitTorrent functionality.

Overview

eXeem was created by Swarm Systems Inc. which is located in Saint Kitts and Nevis. The company employed Andrej Preston, the founder of Suprnova.org, as its spokesperson and public face of eXeem. Five thousand Suprnova.org users were selected to take part in a private beta test of eXeem before the public beta was released on January 21, 2005. eXeem's developers expected to implement the following features:

Criticism of eXeem

Criticism of eXeem arose soon after it debuted and included:

Network

The eXeem network used super-peers that were used to track torrents (as ordinary BitTorrent trackers). These super-peers were also responsible for maintaining file lists, comments and ratings for part of the files in the network. When a peer that was tracking a torrent was closed or went down, a new peer was assigned to be the tracker for that particular torrent.