Hello, and welcome to our regular biweekly update on Beam! We wish everyone to stay safe and healthy. Team Beam is operating extremely hard on the major releases as a very significant milestone is about to happen. It was recently announced that Beam’s second hard fork is expected to take place on June 28, 2020. PoW algorithm will change from BeamHash II to BeamHash III, which will enable fuller GPU card capabilities.
Moreover, the June hard fork will provide some new features like confidential assets, one-sided payments, and the support of privacy protocol, Lelantus MW. To recall, the first planned BEAM Hard Fork was successful. The fork occurred at block 321,321 on August 19, 2019, and everything went as expected. Previously, the fork changed the mining algorithm from Beam Hash I to Beam Hash II. For a new upgrade, compatible releases of node, wallet, and miner will be versioned Eager Electron 5.0. The node and the Desktop Wallet binaries will be released around the end of May to allow everyone approximately 30 days to update to the new version; the Mobile Wallets for Android and iOS will be delivered a little later. All users will only need to upgrade their software to the latest version, so stay informed with the news and guidelines on the official channels.
Furthermore, team Beam was busy working on the significant launch of Double Doppler 4.2. That established several fresh improvements, including decentralized notifications, Atomic Swap Market Maker API to obtain info, and take part in Atomic Swaps easily. Don’t forget to check it out! All in all, there were 60 commits last week; the biweekly-period dynamics are accessible in our update.
Although these are not the easiest times for people worldwide, the Beam community remains loyal, strong, and supportive. There were many media highlights, videos, and articles. A great interview with Alexander Zaidelson, Beam Business Lead, was published in Japanese for the Beam Japanese community and was hugely covered on Yahoo Finance, Investing.com, Gunocy, and others. Also, the second video in a series about why privacy matters was posted recently in Beam Twitter to keep the community updated with all the latest industry news. Besides, in the report for week 15, they shared a short overview of the shops and services that do accept Beam as a Payment Method. Don’t miss it out! The number of subscribers in main Beam social networks and chats keeps growing. Read the details below!
Development
- Download a Beam wallet and synchronize it to a remote node, or build your own dedicated server and compile a private node via the link. Running Beam node as it is not only strengthening network but also preserves decentralization. Beam node is really lightweight as it has tx cut through built-in. See post.
- Beam Double Doppler 4.2.8632 Release
{Features}
- [desktop wallet] In one word: “notifications”, in two: “decentralized notifications”! The wallet address won’t be exposed when any notification is received. The wallet will nicely tell you about transaction completion or when it’s time to update the wallet to a new version. No worries, the wallet will never auto-update — this decision is entirely in your hands.
- [desktop wallet] Exchange rates to USD/BTC. Under the hood they use the same decentralized notifications infrastructure, hence again, your privacy stays solid.
- [api] Atomic Swap API for market-makers. Build your systems to manage decentralized atomic swap orders!
- [infrastructure] Wallet Identity was added to proof and ensure that transaction performs between claimed participants.
- [cli wallet] Laser beams for instantaneous BEAM transfer
{Improvements}
- [desktop wallet] Payment proof added when transaction history is exported
- [desktop wallet] AddAll button when sending BEAM
{Fixes}
- [desktop wallet] “Where to buy BEAM” button is back
Over 90 tasks accomplished in total, for more details please see here.
Release date: April 22
{General Notes}
In some cases, the wallet can take up to 20 minutes for converting databases to the new format on the first start after update.
It is recommended to finish all ongoing transactions and swaps before upgrading to a new version
{Fixes}
[desktop wallet, cli wallet, api] Atomic Swaps — Node height incorrect validation on swap progress
Beam’s second hard fork is expected to take place on June 28, 2020.
{Breaking changes}
- PoW algorithm will change from BeamHash II to BeamHash III. More details on BeamHash III will be shared closer to the time.
2. Activate support for Confidential Assets
3. Activate support for Lelantus Mimblewimble
4. Activate support for One-Sided Payments
{Timeline}
Compatible releases of node, wallet, and miner will be versioned Eager Electron 5.0.
The Node and the Desktop Wallet binaries will be released around the end of May, 2020 to allow everyone approximately 30 days to upgrade to the new version.
The Mobile Wallets for Android and iOS will be released a little later.
All users will only need to upgrade their software to the latest version.
The binaries will support the current blockchain, and will automatically switch to the new consensus mechanism when the target block height is reached. No user intervention will be required. Funds will not be affected.
{Compatibility}
After the Block Height 777777 is reached, wallets earlier than 5.0 will stop working. The users will need to upgrade the wallets to version 5.0 or later to access the funds.
You can also read about the coming update on Cointelegraph and BTCManager.
- Beam 2020 Week #15 — Covering April 6th — April 12th 2020
{R&D Updates}
- Testnet — Double Doppler 4.2.8646 — released
- Mainnet — Double Doppler 4.2.8646 — testing nearing completion
- Eager Electron 5.0 — Work well underway
- Week in commits: 37
- Wallet Channels — complete
- Atomic Swaps API — complete
- Hardware Wallet refactoring — complete
- Web Wallet — complete
- Beam 2020 Week #16 — Covering April 13th — April 19th 2020
{R&D Updates}
- Mainnet — Double Doppler 4.2.8646 — released
- Eager Electron 5.0 — Work well underway
- Week in commits: 60
- Wallet Channels — complete
- Atomic Swaps API — released
- Hardware Wallet refactoring — complete
- Web Wallet — testnet incoming
Social encounters
- Why does privacy matter to you? — regular video updates on top privacy stories making headlines around the world.
…and a lot more!
- A great interview with Alexander Zaidelson, Beam Business Lead, for the Beam Japanese community. It was hugely covered on Yahoo Finance, Investing.com, Gunocy, Fisco, Zai Online, Zaikei Newspaper, Magmag News, Gentosha Gold, and MSN.
- CoinJoy Weekly News — JACK DORSEY DONATES, MINING, IDENTIFYING SATOSHI, BINANCE HIRING, BEAM COIN
- Beam 2020 Week #15 — Covering April 6th — April 12th 2020 — Community & Press
The community has spoken and chosen their favorite Beam girl to stay at home with. You can find her in the mix of the new sticker pack and encourage those around you to stay safe. Join the beam telegram chat and use these amazing stickers!
- Why Privacy Matters — The first in an ongoing series by Beam, outlining global privacy concerns, and asking the community why these matter to them
- Blockchain, Privacy, and Beam for Dummies — Some great insights into the world of blockchain, privacy and Beam, by African Ambassadors Obinna and Wisdom
- The Daily Chain shares the HASHR8 Privacy Coin Reviews: BEAM with their community
- Some Reasons Why Beam is the Privacy Coin of the Future in this piece by John P. Njui on Crypto Gazette
- Beam 2020 Week #16 — Covering April 13th — April 19th 2020 — Community & Press
- Insights into Beam’s ongoing development for the Chinese community in Double Doppler 4.2主网测试进入尾声, by First VIP
- Beam Ambassador Obinna, discussing Beam, and the importance of privacy with the Crypto Accademy
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.
Finance
- Raskul’s Beam mining pool is now listed on Mining Pools Stats.
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
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
