Hello, and welcome to our traditional biweekly update on Beam! While the world is slowly waking up after the global shutdown, the team Beam continues to operate vividly, as the upcoming hardfork will happen on 28th June! Development and testing for the expected release are steaming ahead, with vast amounts of work taking place on Atomic Swaps, Confidential Assets, and Lelantus. Wilke Trei, Beam PoW advisor, and Beam Foundation board member explained the BeamHash III, its significance in the overall mining landscape, and what improvements the new algo brings with it in the recently released video at Beam YouTube channel. Please check it and participate in a follow-up community Q&A regarding Beam Hash III. As you may know, BeamHash III will be the final PoW algorithm for Beam. It is, of course, an upgrade from I and II, and the vanilla Equihash on which the original was based. The goal was to create a PoW algo that can see Beam to a successful future, focusing on stability, GPU mining community, and users. Furthermore, Sasha Abramovich shared a sneak preview into the multiasset future of Beam. One of the incredible new features will come with the Hard Fork, and later be seamlessly integrated to the wallets, Lelantus MW! The latter adds to Beam’s already stellar privacy, enabling users to break the linkability of their UTXOs, and giving them extra protections when absolutely necessary. All in all, there were 129 commits over a period of two weeks.
As you all know, the community plays a crucial role in Beam’s life. The number of subscribers in social networks and active chat participants shows positive dynamics. It is also worth mentioning multiple social media posts and highlights that have appeared during the last two weeks. The third part in an ongoing series on Why Privacy Matters, not just for private cryptocurrencies, but in our daily lives was created in order to enlighten people about the real value of privacy coins. Raskul made a video-shopping-guide to show how you can easily spend your Beams with services and stores that accept Beam as a payment method. He also shared an extensive article “Of Privacy in Cryptocurrencies, Atomic Swaps, and How We’re Trying To Fix It.” Another article was published by Kenyan ambassador Obinna Nwankwo. He elaborated on why Africans should choose cryptocurrency over mobile money.
By the way, Cruxpool Beam mining pool is finally officially live — check the report below for more!
Stay safe and keep yourself informed with Paradigm!
Development
The new mining algorithm will take effect with the upcoming Hard Fork, expected around the 28th of June, 2020. Block 777,777. In the video above, Wilke Trei, gives an in-depth explanation on Beam Hash III. There will be a follow-up Q&A for the community to ask questions regarding Beam Hash III, please add your questions here.
- А sneak preview into the multiasset future of BEAM. This shows one of the incredible new features that will come with the Hard Fork, and later be seamlessly integrated to the wallets, Lelantus MW! Lelantus adds to Beam’s already stellar privacy, enabling users to break the linkability of their UTXOs, and giving them extra protections when absolutely necessary. An enormous upgrade is coming for Beam, and this is but a part of it. Be sure to follow Sasha for more Beam product previews! Development and testing for the upcoming Hard Fork is steaming ahead, with huge amounts of work taking place on Atomic Swaps, Confidential Assets, and of course Lelantus.
- Beam 2020 Week #19 — Spend It — Covering May 4th — May 10th, 2020 — R&D Updates
Development and testing for the upcoming fork is progressing nicely, with the fork expected around the 28th of June. For more details, hit up the announcement, and eye up all the exciting updates that come with it.
- Week in commits: 53
- Eager Electron 5.0 — testing underway
- Atomic Swaps API — released with ongoing improvements
- Web Wallet — testnet incoming
- Beam 2020 Week #20 — BeamHash III — Covering May11th — May 17th 2020
We’ve already mentioned BeamHash III above while speaking about an amazing Wilke Trei’s video. In Beam’s recent update, the team gave another extensive summary.
The Final Algo
BeamHash III will be the final PoW algo that Beam settles on. This has a number of key benefits for the network, miners, and users. For the network, it brings with it stability. Rather than chopping and changing algo every six months, this opens the door for more in-depth development and investment into both software and hardware relating to Beam mining. On the user front, this means they can have more confidence in the usability of Beam, without the worry of updating, although they will make sure it’s worth it.
GPU Mining
As a PoW coin, Beam has always pushed for a strong community of GPU miners. Their strength is not just in their sol/s, but the endless positive impact they have on the network and community alike. BeamHash III is no different. Like the two Hard Forks, the new PoW algo was designed for them to be an ever-important part of the network and community moving forward.
Efficacy
BeamHash III is of course an upgrade from I and II, and the vanilla Equihash on which the original was based. The goal was to create a PoW algo that can see Beam to a successful future, and they feel that the focus on stability, GPU mining community, and users, will see this coming to fruition. Wilke has also put efforts into making the algo more efficient for the miners supporting the network. This will be determined after the algo change, but so far things are looking good!
Social encounters
- Our mention of Beam in the 7th edition of Weekly Shortcuts focused on privacy coins.
- Why Privacy Matters: Part 3 — the third part in an ongoing series on Why Privacy Matters, not just for private cryptocurrencies, but in our daily lives.
- Of Privacy in Cryptocurrencies, Atomic Swaps, and How We’re Trying To Fix It by Raskul.
“Beam can fix this and their developer’s plans to include opt-in audit-ability into the mix (as well as further privacy-enhancing measures — see Lelantus Mimblewimble) goes much of the way to the development of what Bitcoin was supposed to be — a sovereign, fungible, confidential currency which gives the user ability to disclose as much, or as little of their transacting as they so desire. Ultimately, pushing out the covetous financial organizations and giving financial power back to the individual.”
- Shopping online, using Beam as a payment method — a video featuring Raskul buying a fancy Beam jacket and a VPN access using Beam tokens.
- Recap: Beam Mobile Wallet Quiz Competition
In light of the Covid19 virus keeping the world on lockdown, the Beam Africa community decided to help her members ease the boredom of staying home all day. A quiz competition was set which was held on the 2nd of May in the Beam Africa Telegram group. Questions for the quiz were drawn mostly from the mobile wallet; features and use cases. A few extra questions came from basic knowledge of the community in terms of leadership.
- CTO Alex Romanov tweeted:
- Crypto Laurianna discussed the Beam Privacy project with some of the core team members. Beam is a scalable, confidential cryptocurrency utilizing mimblewimble.
- The Beam Kenya ambassador wrote a brilliant article on “Why Africans should choose Cryptocurrency over Mobile Money”. He highlighted pros of cryptocurrency over mobile money, including points below:
- First, your transaction is secure and safe. Both parties can confidently trade without fear of fraud from external parties.
- Your transactions are not controlled or regulated by a designated body or government.
- Its deflationary nature is good for long term investment.
- It does not just serve as a medium of exchange, it also serves as a medium of payment for goods and services.
- It eliminates across the border transitionary problem and drastically reduces services charges on transactions made.
- Beam 2020 Week #19 — Spend It — Covering May 4th — May 10th 2020 — Press
- An awesome new sticker pack by and for the community to keep them dynamically updated on the supply, mining, and market
- Beam sitting at number 14 for merchant acceptance, on Cryptwerk
- Battle of the Privacy Coins: Eight Month Update, by Contrast Crypto
- LunarCRUSH coin of the day = BEAM
- A happy anniversary from Beam to F2Pool, featuring Amir
- Coverage of the upcoming Beam Hard Fork, in Lightblocks
- Beam 2020 Week #20 — BeamHash III — Covering May11th — May 17th 2020 — Press
- Coverage of the BeamHash III proof of work upgrade in CoinPedia and U. Today
- A great guide on How to Mine Beam Cryptocurrency, by Changelly
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}
- 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
- Cruxpool Beam mining pool is now officially live. You can connect by using this link. Check the Beam page here. More information about how to mine Beam via the link.
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!
The list has a heavy focus on (but in no way limited to) those where privacy can be crucial e.g. VPNs and VPSs. It makes sense if purchasing something such as a VPN to do so in a private manner. Beam provides us with the opportunity to do so.
There are also a number of other great stores where you can make purchases in a private manner with Beam:
- PIA — feature-rich, privacy-focused VPN
- The Bob Shop — get yourself some great Beam and crypto merchandise
- Crypto Coffee — turn your Proof of Beam into their Proof of Bean
- Cyber Hour — big Beam fans with privacy-focused VPS and domain hosting
- Lynx Art Collection — Some high-quality crypto art for your walls and wallets
- Steve Dressler Music — Keep your ears in tune with Steve’s musical masterpieces
- Beam Bet — for getting your gamble on, by the great vsnation
- Special shoutout to the first known Taobao seller accepting Beam as payment
These are but a handful of the merchants accepting Beam, be sure to check out the rest and show your support.
- Beam Pay — A Beam specific payment processor that allows integration with online stores to automatically manage all your transactions. Beampay is already integrated and on display at https://store.beamprivacy.community/.
- Coinpayments — Integrated payment gateway for cryptocurrencies from Beam to Bitcoin and beyond
- NOWPayments — An easy way to accept Beam and other cryptocurrency payments
There are a couple of great ways to keep up to date with who is accepting Beam. The first of which was recently launched by Beam Ambassador Daniel, with the Pay in BEAM Twitter account. This adds to his already extensive efforts, and is a great initiative keeping the community up to date with who’s accepting Beam, and promotes Beam acceptance and adoption. The second, Cryptwerk, gives a list of merchants accepting Beam, with ratings, and a brief overview on the vendors. You can also jump over to the Beam Accepted Here page on site. This is an exhaustive list of merchants that are accepting Beam, and is updated on a regular basis.
Some highlights:
- Protect your online privacy from attack with Windscribe
- Buy Gold and other precious metals from Bitgild
- Show support for a great cause with the Wiki Leaks Shop
- Get yourself a feature rich, privacy focused VPN from PIA
- Get more from your mining rigs with Hive OS
- Support the Beam Community Store
How to accept Beam:
- Beam Pay — A Beam specific payment processor that allows integration with online stores to automatically manage all your transactions. Beampay is already integrated and on display at The Beam Store.
- Coinpayments — Integrated payment gateway for cryptocurrencies from Beam to Bitcoin and beyond
The great Vsnation is working on more initiatives to drive adoption, with plugins for the most popular online merchant platforms on their way.
Other
- A picture from Telegram chat:
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
