Development Status Update

April is here, and we want to update the community on our progress and where we are standing against our planned roadmap.

Below we will share the status of the features that we are targeting for Bright Boson release and where each one of them stands.

Beam<>BTC Atomic Swap

Atomic Swap is the capability to exchange one coin to another without the need for a trusted third party.

The task proved to be very complicated, but we made outstanding progress with that. At the moment, we have a working implementation of atomic swaps from Beam to Bitcoin and back. Currently, the Swap works only through our CLI wallet.

In the coming week or two, we will be providing a recorded demo how Atomic Swap works, and we will be releasing the CLI version of Atomic Swap during April.

For May, we are planning to release a nice UI for the Atomic Swap so that it is accessible to less technical users.

The later step in this direction will include a Bulletin Board that will allow Beamers to post-atomic swap offers in a decentralized way.

You can find the code for Atomic Swap here. The concept is described here and the detailed documentation will be available soon.

Hardware Wallet Integration

We are still working on it. Our initial target platform is Trezor T. We initially hoped that we could do without implementing Bulletproofs in the hardware wallet, but after some research, we understood that we could not go around this and we are now working on implementing Bulletproofs. We estimate that the work will take several more weeks.

The source code for Trezor T (work in progress) is available here.

Mobile Wallets

The initial versions of both iOS and Android wallets are now available through Google Play and TestPilot, respectively.

Currently, our beautiful mobile wallets work on the Testnet, and after some testing, we will be releasing the Mainnet versions. For iOS, we will also need to pass Apple’s rigorous testing procedures.

Payment Platforms Integration

We finished the wallet API for payment, and it is now ready for prime time. The full API documentation is available here.

We spent some time researching BTCPay integration, but it turns out that due to the differences in BTC and Mimblewimble architectures, BTCPay integration is not readily achievable. We will revisit this once we release the one-sided payments.

We are now talking to several companies in the space to integrate Beam payments and make them available for merchants everywhere.

We are also working to make Beam donations a thing — our friends at CoinGecko have already enabled Beam donations, and we are talking to more partners who want to do that.

Fast Node Sync

This development will greatly reduce the time required for synchronization of a node that is coming online after a prolonged offline period. It is especially relevant for personal nodes running on PCs. Beams nodes will be able to do cut-through from arbitrary block-height in the most bandwidth minimizing way.

It was already released for Testnet, and will be released for Mainnet as part of the new Node and Wallet version later this week. The documentation is available here.

Payment confirmation

This feature provides the ability for a sender and a receiver of funds to prove that a specific transaction for a particular amount occurred.

Upon successful transaction completion, a sender will receive a proof, signed by the receiver, referencing a specific transaction kernel on the blockchain. In case of a dispute, both sides will be able to unequivocally prove that a certain amount was sent and successfully received at a particular time. For details, see user manual and technical documentation

In addition to those high-level features, we were, of course, working on additional stuff, such as fixing bugs, documentation, UI improvements and more.

One last thing

Overall, we are very proud of what we have achieved so far and are excited about the future. As is happens a lot with software, some of the features proved harder than we initially thought and took more time than initially planned. On the other hand, we were able to get to iOS wallet faster than we thought and added two complex and essential features that were not on the initial roadmap.

This is the nature of software development. We will continue to execute according to the roadmap and update it from time to time.

We really appreciate the community support and involvement. In our recent Survey, we asked about the importance of various features for Beam community and got valuable feedback.

We hope to do more of those in the future.

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