Hello to all Beamers! Following our lovely tradition, we are here to provide you with a recap of projects’ news and updates of the past two weeks! This period was pretty eventful both for the team Beam and the community. CTO Alex Romanov, in his development video series, shared that Beam is “moving forward on all fronts.” More specifically, significant progress was made with Web Wallet infrastructure, Double Doppler 4.2 features, hardware wallet refactoring, and Lelantus wallet integration. Moreover, Double Doppler 4. 1 for Android was released with cutting-edge typos, explanatory messages, elements placements, colors — all to make the app more eye-pleasing and more user-friendly. Dev team continues to commit regularly on GitHub, thus tackling milestones in the freshly-updated roadmap.
As we’ve said before, not only the development part of the project is moving forward! Numerous international media highlights appeared and a couple of ambassador events were arranged in order to spread precious knowledge about Beam, blockchain and privacy. Beam lead African ambassador Agbona Igwemoh was a guest of Yellow Card’s Crypto Conversations, where the discussion touched upon the grey areas of financial privacy and how to secure it. Furthermore, Beam Africa had it’s first representation in Accra, Ghana during the Tezos Ghana meetup. The Ghana ambassador George spoke about reasons why privacy matters, and how Beam ensures financial confidentiality, making project the best-in-class-privacy cryptocurrency. Another point to mention — amazing AMAs with Beam CEO and CTO that were starring throughout the week. The first with Alexander Zaidelson, Beam Business Lead, woth the help of The AMA Room, across Twitter and Telegram. The second was with Alex Romanov, Beam Tech Lead, taking place with the Huobi Nigeria community. Notably, Beam’s beloved Discord underwent a revamp, with the addition of some new community roles, a channel for spreading the word on Privacy Matters, and a place for merchants accepting Beam to share their products and services. A lot of effort is put to build a strong and loyal community. Hence, the number of subscribers in social networks and in chats continues to increase.
Besides, Beam was added to several new platforms, and now the team is calling all Beamers to vote for Kucoin listing, as there is a choice between Beam, Ravencoin, Callisto Network, Zel and Axe.
Vote for Beam, and stay with Paradigm!
Development
- Beam Weekly Development Update — 15 February 2020. Follow what has been happening this week for BEAM in the latest development update clip from Alex Romanov, CTO of Beam.
An article on this is available on Github.
- Beam 2020 Week #7 — Covering February 10th — February 16th 2020 — R&D Updates
- Wallet Notifications — in progress
- Atomic Swap API — complete — Testing currently underway
- Web Wallet Service — in progress
- Hardware Wallet refactoring — in progress
- Mimblewimble Confidential Lelantus Assets outlined
- Android release expected this week
- General regression testing will start next week
- Beam Weekly Development Update — 21st February 2020. An update on this weeks developments, covering the upcoming Web Wallet, and the recently released android update.
- General — Release notes
- Fixes — Typos, explanatory messages, elements placements, colors — all to make the app more eye-pleasing and more intuitive to use.
- Beam 2020 Week #8 — Covering February 17th — February 23rd 2020
- Atomic Swap API — complete — Testing currently underway
- Lelantus MW Wallet integration — Testing currently underway with bug fixes
- Web Wallet Service — in progress — Testing will start next week
- Hardware Wallet refactoring — complete
- Beam dockers, always updated to the latest version, can be found here.
- New lolMiner update is now available! Main changes:
- Improved performance for GRIN-C29M
- Added BEAM support for AMD Radeon 5500, 5600 and 5700 (+XT versions)
Social encounters
- Calling all Beamers, vote for Beam for Kucoin listing!
- Beam 2020 Week #7 — Covering February 10th — February 16th 2020.
They gave a sneak peek what’s been happening industry wide:
- Crypto Derivatives Exchange FTX adds PRIV, which tracks a basket of eight privacy coins, Beam included.
- Murmurs from Mnuchin continue, with the Treasury Secretary pointing to plans for Cryptocurrency rules regarding transparency.
- Federal Reserve Chair, Jerome Powell, expressed an implied need for privacy in digital currencies.
- Some insights came to light on the extent of the relationship between Chainalysis’, the US Government, and the multimillion-dollar contracts that tie them together.
- Legal issues faced for individuals involved with centralised mixing solutions offering privacy on top of the Bitcoin network
Some interesting news, with one thing that rings clear; the need for opt in auditability for both individuals and corporations. An important part of Beam’s vision is this ability to remain compliant with relevant regulators, at the users' discretion.
Press
- Our (Paradigm) update presented to Beam Chinese community:
Beam：更新的路线图发布，Defi基础设施，MimbleWimble新机密资产Lelantus页面，付款证明解释，AMA部分. - The AMA held in r/CryptoCurreny, with Alex Romanov and Alexander Zaidelson.
- Cryptonews with an in-depth overview of Beam.
- A look into Beam and Mimblewimble by the Russian speaking community in Обзор криптовалюты BEAM на блокчейне Mimblewimble.
- Swap Space adds Beam to their platform.
- Audio track ‘Nuit’ composed and recorded by very talented Raskul, resampling internet advertisement compiling a Beam node and wallet build and run on power 9, ppc64le, Talos II, dual 22 core with 176 execution units.
- Beam lead African ambassador Agbona Igwemoh was a guest of Yellow Card’s Crypto Conversations hosted by their very own Emmanuel. The conversation was around the grey areas of financial privacy and how to secure it. Watch the full video here.
- Beam Africa had it’s first representation in Accra, Ghana during the Tezos Ghana meetup. The Ghana ambassador George Pro spoke about reasons why Privacy Matters, and how Beam ensures financial confidentiality making project the best-in-class-privacy cryptocurrency.
- Beam community art page is fascinating! Check it out!
- Beam 2020 Week #8 — Covering February 17th — February 23rd 2020
A big week for Beam, especially on the community front, with a number of events taking place across various platforms. A couple of great AMAs took place throughout the week. The first with Alexander Zaidelson, Beam Business Lead, with The AMA Room, across Twitter and Telegram. The second was with Alex Romanov, Beam Tech Lead, taking place with the Huobi Nigeria community. You can read through the full AMA with Zaidelson, and also check out the AMA with Romanov.
Beam’s beloved Discord community underwent a revamp, with the addition of some new community roles, a channel for spreading the word on Privacy Matters, and a place for merchants accepting Beam to share their products and services with the community.
- An in-depth review of Beam in Russian, by Altcoinlog
- Some bullish sentiment resinating from reddit in Five Undervalued Crypto Coins, by u/eleanorcwhite
- Some awesome coverage of Beam and what lies ahead for 2020 from the Chinese community, in 金色观察丨2020首个减半币种 隐私币Beam全信息总结, featured in Jinse
- A review in the French article: Grin et Beam, les apprentis sorciers de MimbleWimble, in Journal Du Coin
- Coverage for the Polish community set to ramp up, with help from the lovely Crypto Queen, at cryptoqueen.pl.
Upcoming events:
- Emerging Tech, Lagos, Nigeria | Feb 28th
- Founders Live Harare Vol. 8, Harare, Zimbabwe | Feb. 28th
- ETHLondon, London, UK | 28th Feb. — 1st Mar.
- London Blockchain Week, UK | Mar. 4th
- Coinfest UK, Manchester, UK | Apr. 3rd
- AMA with Binance South Africa | Mar.
Roadmap
- According to Beam Foundation Roadmap update Q1 2020:
They will launch a family of products that will serve as a foundation for the Beam Confidential DeFi Ecosystem(again, the first of its kind in the space):
{Before the fork}
- Atomic Swap marketplace will leave Beta with numerous UX fixes and API for market-makers. This will improve the liquidity and make it possible for anyone to exchange Beam for BTC, LTC, QTUM (or vise versa) confidentially, without intermediaries and with no counterparty risk
- Laser Beam — the Instant payments technology to eventually enable instant immediate payments, micropayments and “streaming” money use-cases.
- Exchange rates to fiat and selected cryptocurrencies will be displayed in the Beam wallet, so you can always know how much your Beam is worth if converted to those currencies.
{After the fork}
- Web Wallet and Wallet Service API is going to be the focal point of the DeFi ecosystem, bringing Beam to every browser (and to 3rd party wallets integrations) with great user experience and without sacrificing users’ privacy
- Confidential Assets on Beam will allow anyone to create and transact new kinds of tokens on the Beam blockchain. These new tokens will have the same confidentiality and great user experience as the native Beam coin. Naturally, support for multiple token types will be added to Beam Wallet.
- Bridges to Ethereum will allow creating Beam representation of certain ERC20 tokens and creating 1-to-1 pegs of such ERC20 tokens to their representation on Beam blockchain.
- Wallet Auditability — an opt-in feature in the wallet that will allow institutional and business users to seamlessly report their transactions to third parties of their choice.
{Later on}
- DeFi Building Blocks. Based on Scriptless scripts technology, they will develop primitives to enable certain kinds of DeFi applications on Beam — think of Collateralized Debt Positions (CDP), lending, STO and more.
- Following the development of the Bridges, it will be possible to create Sidechains that will support complementary advanced technologies such as smart contracts with EOS, Ethereum, etc
Privacy enhancements
- Lelantus MW will be released on Mainnet. Lelantus MW dramatically increases the UTXO anonymity set and makes it virtually impossible to establish links between different UTXOs.
- One-side payments. Based on Leantus MW technology, one-sided payments will allow sending and receiving Beam without Mimblewimble’s interactivity requirement. Today, the receiver must come online at most 12 hours after a transaction is initiated, which may be inconvenient at times. One-sided payments remove that need.
- Tor/i2P will enhance layer 0 privacy beyond Dandelion++
Later on:
- Dandelion is currently used by the nodes when broadcasting transactions to the network. However, the SBBS messages are currently sent directly by the originator. SBBS over Dandelion will help to obfuscate every message sender.
- Mixnet integration to further enhance layer 0 privacy
Security enhancements
- Ledger and Trezor support. Bringing Beam to Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets turned out to be a complex task. They have recently done a lot of progress in reducing the memory footprint and computational complexity of Beam integration, which will allow support of the most popular Ledger and Trezor models.
- Multisig support will allow committing transactions only when approved by multiple signatures. Standard “M out of N” schemes will be implemented.
Usability
- They want to remove the current limitation of not using the same seed phrase from several wallets simultaneously, so at first, we’ll enable sync of balance and transactions history; later on, full sync (addresses, full transaction data) will be implemented
- Notifications about the new version for desktop wallets will come handy so you’ll always be up-to-date
Miscellaneous (others)
- Beamhash III will be the final Beam POW algorithm. BeamHash III is proof of work designed to create a smooth transition from GPU mining to Asics in the future. While perfectly fitted to today’s capacities of GPUs, especially their memory bandwidth, it also will allow rather simple and cost-efficient asic designs. Compared with the current BeamHash II algorithm the performance of BeamHash III is more independent of the underlying GPU architecture and less energy-consuming. Furthermore, upcoming Asics may be produced using a more power and cost-efficient chip design as well.
- GhostDAG consensus upgrade, when activated, will enable much better mining decentralization, faster confirmation on L1 (seconds) and much higher throughput (Transactions/sec), which will serve to keep fees low even when demand for Beam and Beam’s CAs will soar.
Finance
- BEAM is on SwapSpace.co.
- BEAM will be listed on Bitribe at 14:00(UTC+8), February 28th.
Partnerships and team members
For more guys from an amazing team Beam click here.
Here you can find the list of the shops and services that do accept Beam as a Payment Method. It is updated every week!
- Beam partnered with CoinFly team!
- Adshares has been just featured on Beam website as one of service providers accepting BEAM as a payment method.
Rumors
- BEAM social volume moving up to a 1-month high today on 1,331 social posts with hourly activity as high as 69 posts per hour. See on LunarCRUSH.
- Beam rocks! See post by BitForex.
- “Beam Logo” low-top sneakers — The Built On Blockchain Shop.
Social media metrics
The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of BEAM Facebook likes, Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. The information is taken from BEAM coingecko.com.
Downloads: Beam Android Wallet | Beam iOS Wallet | Beam Desktop Wallet
