Welcome to our biweekly update on Beam! We hope all the Beamers are staying safe, healthy, and at home, as Team Beam and even the Beam Girl! Due to the current situation, the team is not planning to attend any offline events. Still, they will inevitably focus the efforts towards online activities for the foreseeable future, so stay tuned! Despite the “home-leaving limitations,” Beam development continues all the way! The progress is minutely shared in the regular weekly newsletters. Lately, they reported that there has been a lot of advancement regarding the upcoming hardfork. Wilke Trei has been hard at it, with the reference miner for Beamhash III now seamlessly switching between Beamhash I, II, and III, proof of work algorithms. Beamhash III will be more memory demanding than the last iteration and access the memory in larger batches, which should enable GPUs to utilize their bandwidth better. More info to follow!
Last week was mostly represented by meticulous testing for Double Doppler 4.2, which is now entering the final testing stages before the release. This version will include Atomic Swap Market Maker API, Wallet Channels, and many upgrades and improvements to Laser Beam. Furthermore, to help overcome some difficulties with node connectivity, which was making it challenging to sync Beam nodes in the mainland, Raskul and Gaoyi took the initiative to set up some mainnet community nodes. The Beam community in China now have dedicated node connectivity for wallet connections, with high compatibility from behind the GFW.
Generally, the team continues to work hard towards achieving all the substantial milestones in their roadmap. The work on Eager Electron 5.0 is presently ongoing. All in all, there were 11 commits this week.
Apart from the steady development, Beam has always had an extremely loyal community that supports the project and every single Beamer even during hard times. Check Beam Telegram chat to get acquainted with the fantastic community members! The main activities are now remote. Besides, Beam Africa is up-scaling the community by moving to Telegram from Whatsapp. This stemmed from some platform issues being faced, potential privacy improvements, and an overall increase in the ability to scale the community. Several Beam highlights appeared in different media channels worldwide. Obinna Nwankwo published an article to give newcomers all the necessary information about blockchain technology, the actual value of privacy, and how the Beam works! Also, a video about why privacy matters nowadays were created for you to understand that Beam is doing an incredibly important job! More cool news&updates you can find below. Stay with us!
Development
- In last 7 days — 6
- In last 1 month — 14
- In last 3 months — 19
- In last 6 month — 21
- In last 1 year — 38
- Beam 2020 Week #13 — Covering March 23rd — March 29th 2020
A great week for Beam, with regression testing well on the way for the upcoming Double Doppler 4.2 release, and work starting to take place on future releases. There has also been a lot of progress regarding the upcoming hardfork (date TBA). Wilke Trei has been hard at it, with the reference miner for Beamhash III now seamlessly switching between Beamhash I, II, and III, proof of work algorithms. Beamhash III will be more memory demanding than the last iteration, and access the memory in larger batches, which should enable GPUs to better utilize their bandwidth. There will be more info on this closer to the hardfork date, so stay tuned. Also on the mining front, Raskul has been putting the open source pool code to work. He is operating a pool on the Beam mainnet, and has been stress testing it with some added hash power the last days.
Also on the mining front, Raskul has been putting the open source pool code to work. He is operating a pool on the Beam mainnet, and has been stress testing it with some added hash power the last days.
{R&D Updates}
Regression testing has started for the Double Doppler 4.2
- Week in commits: 18
- Wallet Channels — complete
- Atomic Swaps API — complete
- Hardware Wallet refactoring — complete
- Web Wallet — complete
- Beam 2020 Week #14 — Covering March 30th — April 5th, 2020
{Double Doppler 4.2 to be released soon}
Another week of meticulous testing for Double Doppler 4.2, with it now entering the final testing stages before release. Below are the few highlights to be included:
Double Doppler 4.2:
- Atomic Swap Market Maker API: This will allow those that wish to add liquidity, and take advantage of potential arbitrage opportunities, with Beams Atomic Swaps. This will enable an increase in volume, in turn allowing users to get into and out of Beam easily, without relying on third-party intermediaries.
- Wallet Channels: A great update that will allow for both wallet update notifications, and BTC / USD value of wallet, in a decentralized, privacy-preserving manner. You won’t be leaking any data to keep up to date, and in the know.
- Laser Beam: The DD 4.2 release comes with many upgrades and improvements to Laser Beam, the bi-directional payment channels that lay the foundation for Beam’s version of the Lightning network. This will allow for instant transactions and opens the doors for wider use-cases such as microtransactions, and streaming money.
All of this and much more is coming with the Double Doppler 4.2 release. To dig into what else is being worked on this year, have a watch of Beam Confidential DeFi Infrastructure, by Alex Romanov, Beam Tech Lead.
{Community nodes}
The Great Firewall of China presented some difficulties with node connectivity which was making it difficult to sync Beam nodes in the mainland. This lead Raskul and Gaoyi to take the initiative to set up some mainnet community nodes. The Beam community in China now have dedicated node connectivity for wallet connections, with great compatibility from behind the GFW. There will be more nodes coming from these two soon, so stay tuned.
- beijing.raskul.com:10127
- china.raskul.com:10127
- nuremberg.raskul.com:10127
If you have a reliable Beam node up and running, and would like to share it with the community, please get in touch with Angus on Twitter or Telegram. If you want to set up a Beam node, but are not sure where to begin, check out the Beam Node User Guide and jump into the chats for assistance.
{R&D Updates}
- Testing is in it’s finally stages for the Double Doppler 4.2 release
- Work is in progress for Eager Electron 5.0
- Week in commits:11
- Wallet Channels — complete
- Atomic Swaps API — complete
- Hardware Wallet refactoring — complete
- Web Wallet — complete
Social encounters
- Beam Africa is up-scaling the community by moving to Telegram from Whatsapp. This stemmed from some platform issues being faced, potential privacy improvements, and an overall increase in the ability to scale the community. Join the amazing Beam community via the link!
- Episodio 112 — Especial Comunidad Blockchain en Cuarentena 2ª parte. — podcast series in Spanish.
- Why Privacy Matters: Part 1 — they take a look into some of the recent privacy related issues happening globally, and ask… Does privacy matter to you?
In short:
- The first generation of privacy coins was spearheaded by Monero (XMR) and ZCash (ZEC).
- Beam (BEAM) falls under a new category of privacy coins with additional features.
- BEAM is relatively young and was launched in January of 2019.
- Its current price of Beam has room for potential in the coming years.
- Team Beam shared ways in which each community member can contribute to the projects’ development in their recent update for the week 13. So let’s take a look at some of those ways, and some guides that can bring us up to speed:
- Master the command line, set up a Beam node, and try out the CLI wallet (if you haven’t already). You can follow this great resource for learning Linux basics from Null-Byte.
- Once you have got up to speed with Linux, you can get the hands dirty setting up your own Beam mining pool, get some friends together, and start smashing blocks.
- If you want to take a closer look at the Beam code, and understand better what you’re reading, you can check out this C++ Tutorial for Complete Beginners on Udemy.
- A great way to contribute to the Beam ecosystem, is creating open source tooling for Beam. One such example is Beam Pay, a payment processor enabling merchants to easily accept Beam as payment. Beam Pay is written in Python, by Vsnation, so jump in and start with an Introduction to Python Programming.
- The upcoming release of Double Doppler 4.2 will include an API for Atomic Swap market making. To get ready for this, you can brush up on your GET and POST requests, json parsing, and the Beam node and CLI wallet deployment.
The above are all free to learn, and it can offer a great way to keep busy, learn some new skills, and contribute to the Beam ecosystem and community moving forward. (If you have something you’re working on or trying out and want to share, jump into the Beam chat and let them know.)
- Beam discord has added a voice channel, which will be used for future community calls and the likes — stay tuned.
- According to Beam 2020 Week #14, there are currently some activities happening within the community.
Beam Girl is staying safe and staying at home, but she needs your help. Get into the Beam Telegram chat and vote for your favorite Beam Girl. The winning design will be added to the new sticker pack to encourage the community to stay safe.
- Blockchain, Privacy and Beam for Dummies — an article by Obinna Nwankwo where he comprehensively elaborates on the value of privacy, and highlight Beam features providing it.
Upcoming events:
Due to the current situation, they are not planning or attending any upcoming offline events. They will focus the efforts towards online activities for the foreseeable future. Join main Beam channels to keep yourself informed about the upcoming online events!
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.
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!
Other
- Security Services Group has released a special Beam version of their Kryptos Private Laptop, patented with hardware protection for USB/Audio/Camera, no hard disk inside, and with Beam wallet preinstalled.
- Beambet.io has a new design! You can check it out. Soon Vsnation will announce a new game — jackpot. Enjoy your time on beambet.io.
- Working from home? Next time you’re part of an online conference call… Put yourself in a Beam universe with these amazing backgrounds! See post.
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
This is not financial advice.
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