Following our good tradition, we are happy to welcome you in this biweekly update on Beam! Despite extremely tough circumstances created by COVID-19, Team Beam continues to operate properly, moving forward on their roadmap. Over the past two weeks, the development of the project was quite vivid. The first open-source pool software was shared with the community and is now ready for any budding pool operators to get set up and running. The software has been a collaborative effort between Greg from Icemining, and Raskul from Beam, and is licensed under the MIT License. By the way, Raskul prepared an in-depth guide so that you will be able to find out what you need to get a pool operational. Dev team has also started regression testing for the Double Doppler 4.2. All in all, there were 93 commits in Beam last week.
Furthermore, in the latest weekly update, it was shared that a fantastic initiative had come from community member Thomas V., who offered to set up a Beam Team for Folding@home. This software puts unused computer resources to work in order to find cures for diseases like cancer, ALS, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Influenza, and many more. They have more recently been working on simulations of COVID-19 proteins to push forward with efforts to find a cure, which is especially important now.
As for the social side, Beam continues to support and educate the community remotely, since lots of crypto events were postponed or canceled due to the outbreak. In the last report, they provided the readers with some useful resources to spend time at home efficiently. Currently, Beam events are mostly arranged in Africa. One of the Beamers, Groot, represented Beam Africa as a guest speaker at CyberCon Portharcourt by Okon Divine Imeh, where conversations touched upon data security, privacy, cybersecurity, and blockchain technology solutions. Moreover, the Lagos ambassador Niran designed a survey and collected data from the Beam African community to find out The Disruptive Ways to Utilize Beam In Africa. Among them were borderless transactions, improved governance, and much more!
Beam is known all over the world, which leads to plenty of mentions in international media and articles. The community is growing along with the activity in social networks and chat. Follow Beam updates and stay home!
Development
- Beam open source pool software, a hard-endeavored collaboration by Beam and Icemining is out. A sneak preview of the Raskul installation guide is available here. The testing pool is at http://94.130.104.164:8010 — you can see what you will get by navigating to this link. The software has been a collaborative effort between Greg from Icemining, and Raskul from Beam, and is licensed under the MIT License.
- Beam 2020 Week #11 — Covering March 9th — March 15th 2020:
- A busy week for Beam, with testing well underway for the upcoming Double Doppler 4.2 release, which is expected in the not so distant future.
- Team Beam Overview (see Partnerships and team members)
- Wallet Channels — testing
- Atomic Swaps API — testing
- Hardware Wallet refactoring — in progress
- Web Wallet — testing
- Beam 2020 Week #12 — Covering March 16th — March 22nd 2020:
A great initiative came from community member Thomas V. — to set up a Beam Team for Folding@home. The Folding@home software puts your unused computer resources to work in order to find cures for diseases like cancer, ALS, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Influenza and many more. They have more recently been working on simulations of COVID-19 proteins to push forward with efforts to find a cure. It would be great for Beamers to band together and join the Beam Team in these ongoing efforts. Team Name: Beam Team, Team Number: 239937
{R&D Updates}
Regression testing has started for the Double Doppler 4.2
Now, you can see progress comparing to the last week:
- Week in commits: 93
- Wallet Channels — complete
- Atomic Swaps API — complete
- Hardware Wallet refactoring — complete
- Web Wallet — complete
Social encounters
- Survey Report: The disruptive ways Beam can be utilized in Africa. The Lagos (Nigeria) ambassador Niran designed a survey, and collected data from the Beam African community with little help from Agbona Igwemoh. Here you can find the survey report, in a short, concise explainer video.
- Borderless transactions — unlike Bitcoin, Beam offers faster confidential transactions with cheaper fees.
- Mobile wallet — user-friendly wallet which can be used for peer-to-peer payments for goods and services in Africa.
- BEAMPAY — a confidential alternative of receiving payments for online platforms, for businesses, NGOs and human rights activities.
- Improved governance — checkmating corruption, ensuring free and fair elections by eliminating centralized corrupt voting systems.
- Confidentiality — security and privacy of financial assets, medical records, identity sovereignty and a lot more.
- Episode 11 — The Vires in Numeris Podcast with Beam Team, Alexander Zaidelson & Alex Romanov.
Topics: Beam creation, roadmap, launching tokens with Beam, Mimble Wimble, BTC, fungibility, free-markets, economics, scaling.
- Groot (@wizziblast11) represented Beam Africa as a guest speaker at CyberCon Portharcourt by Okon Divine Imeh. They had conversations around data security, Privacy, Cybersecurity, & discussed blockchain technology solutions to the problems of financial privacy and sovereignty.
- Other exciting blockchain events in Southern Nigeria with presentations of Beam Africa:
- A great overview in “What is Beam” by Adit Gupta, on The Crypto Associate.
- The BeamBet gambling platform, adds a Jackpot game to its a line out.
- From here on, Beam news and updates will also be shared on the Beam Binance Info page.
- Another great update in Beam开源矿池软件已就绪，等待您的加入, by First.VIP.
- Beam video content is now being translated to Chinese and uploaded for the community on Weibo, by Gaoyi.
- Beam coverage in Top 5 des crypto-monnaies de la semaine: sidechain, paiements et confidentialité, by breakingnews.fr.
Upcoming events:
- AMA with Binance South Africa | Mar. 28th
- Coinfest UK, Manchester, UK | Apr. 3rd
- Africa Blockchain Week, Lagos, Nigeria | 28th Mar. — 5th Apr.
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 now available for exchange not only on StealthEX.io but also right from your Telegram App with their Bot.
- For those looking to get more involved in the Beam mining communities, you can find them on Discord, and Telegram, and be sure to reach out to Raskul, the Beam Miner Community Strategy Manager.
- More community members building rigs for mining Beam.
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!
- According to the recent update of Beam 2020 Week #11, Beam has a number of talented individuals and teams working together on its holistic goals. There are a number of important aspects to Beam, with work being required on such things as Research and Development, Quality Assurance, Product, Design, Community, Marketing, and Business Development. Much of the Product and Design teams are based in and around Thailand, Indonesia, and Ukraine. The brunt of the R&D and QA work takes place in Belarus, Ukraine, and Israel. For the non-development work, team members are spread far and wide in China, England, Scotland, Nigeria, and Israel. the Beam Foundation governing the protocol has a vast geographical diversity, with board members in Israel, Singapore, Germany, and Canada.
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
