Hello, and welcome to the biweekly update on Beam! The project did over 65 quality releases in its first year of Mainnet, and the level of development performance remains exceptional. The first milestone to mention is a long-awaited in-depth roadmap for the plans ahead, the reasoning behind them, and what all this will mean for Beam. Lots of upcoming dev releases were featured: Double Doppler with Atomic Swap market-making API, instant payments with Laser Beam, Web Wallet and chrome extension; Eager Electron with Confidential Assets Infrastructure, Bridges, Lelantus MW, and one-side payments: Hard Fork with the change of POW mining algorithm to Beam Hash III. In addition, Beam CTO, Alex Romanov, provided an extremely enlightening video about Confidential DeFi Infrastructure and the applications that could be built on it. Another tech milestones were mentioned in a development update, that was also shared by Beam CTO. He reported that a lot of work was done on confidential assets and Lelantus MW infrastructure, web wallet and wallet service, as well as other tasks in progress. In order to educate the community, a tutorial with simple step-by-step instructions on how proof of payment works on private Beam transactions was shared. Double Doppler 4.1 was upgraded with typos, explanatory messages, elements placements, colors — all to make the app more eye-pleasing and more intuitive to use.
Furthermore, Beam had a pretty active public life over the period and was widely covered in media. Beam’s first-ever female ambassador, Kevine Alobadi, was part of a tech event organized by GDG Abomey-Calavi in Cotonou, Benin Republic. It was an excellent opportunity for her to engage and inform the techies in her local region about Beam and the need for confidential assets. Also, an AMA Session was arranged on Reddit with numerous questions from the community to be answered by Alexander Zaidelson and Alex Romanov. By the way, Adshares, a decentralized ad network, added the support of Beam, so currently, it’s possible to pay for advertising services using Beam token.
The community keeps growing in social networks; community members are also stably active in Telegram and on Reddit. Join them — they are always ready to support newcomers! More info to follow. See you in two weeks!
Development
- Development activity according to CoinCodeCap:
- Beam Confidential DeFi Infrastructure — Special Edition. Beam CTO Alex Romanov presents an overview of the work in progress Beam Confidential DeFi Infrastructure. Explaining what will be possible on the Beam base layer privacy blockchain and how Beam intends to evolve the product in the future.
The video firstly gives an overview of the infrastructure that they are building, including confidential assets, Lelantus MW, Scriptless Scripts and a new wallet architecture. The second part discusses the applications that are able to be built on this infrastructure. Below are some highlights from the video:
- Beam did over 65 quality releases in its first year of Mainnet. This is a unique achievement in the space. Beam’s dev team rocks. See post by Guy Corem.
- Beam Weekly Development Update 07/02/2020 — Weekly development update from Alex Romanov, CTO of BEAM. This week, they look at what has happened over the last week and updated roadmap.
- MW-CLA — Mimblewimble Confidential Lelantus Assets — This page describes the most recent system design, which will be activated on Fork2. It includes CA (confidential assets), Lelantus-MW, as well as will enable adding more features in the future.
Those are the key features:
- CA support
-each UTXO may optionally have a blinded asset tag (similar to the Elements design by A.Poelstra).
-there’s a proof of validity of the asset tag. It’s based on the 1-out-of-many Sigma protocol (by Jens Groth).
2. Shielded pool (a.k.a. Lelantus-MW)
-CA support for shielded operations too
-Support for one-side payments and direct anonymous payments
3. The system design is heterogeneous in nature:
-All kernels carry an excess blinding factor, and (optionally) extra validation rules (height lock, relative lock, etc.)
-Some kernels may control subsystems: Asset control (creation, emission); Shielded operations (mint, spend).
-Those kernels, in addition to contributing to the balance, will have side effects as well.
- Beam Tutorial: Explaining Payment Proofs. Watch an informative guide on how Beam proof of payment works on private Beam transactions.
General
Fixes
- Typos, explanatory messages, elements placements, colors — all to make the app more eye-pleasing and more intuitive to use.
Known limitations
- When restoring your funds in automatic mode, verify that your most recent transaction (from any device) was completed at least 1 hour ago. Otherwise, your restored balance may be incorrect and additional restore procedure will be required.
- When restoring your funds with your specific node, verify that the node is fully synchronized with the blockchain before starting the restore procedure. Otherwise, your restored balance may be incorrect and additional restore procedure will be required.
- Beam 2020 Week #5 — Covering January 27th — February 2nd 2020
R&D Updates
- Web wallet frontend — full screen view (completed)
- Web wallet backend — architecture reworked — SBBS monitor ( in progress); Wallet service (in progress)
- Confidential Assets in CLI wallet integration (in progress)
- Using Lelantus MW to hide CA asset type (completed)
- Wallet Notifications (previously Wallet channels) (in progress)
- New iOS version will be released this week
- Lelantus CLI Wallet integration (in progress)
- HW wallet refactoring (in progress)
- Beam 2020 Week #6 — Covering February 3rd — February 9th 2020
R&D Updates
- Web Wallet full screen view — completed
- Confidential Assets with Lelantus asset type hiding integration — completed
- Wallet Notifications — in progress
- Atomic Swap API — in progress
- Web Wallet Service — in progress
- Hardware Wallet refactoring — in progress
- iOS Double Doppler 4.1 releases
Social encounters
- Beam held an AMA session! Check the answers by Alexander Zaidelson (Business Lead), and Alex Romanov (Tech Lead) on the hottest questions, asked by the community.
- Beam 2020 Week #5 — Covering January 27th — February 2nd 2020
Community Updates from January
The month of January presented with many events for Beam and the community. The first birthday celebration for Beam, combined with the first halving, made for an exciting start to the year. Beam Ambassadors managed to attend a number of great events to continue to build a strong community.
Some highlights from the last month:
- Obinna represented on the panel at the OKEx event, The Blockchain Talk, in Nakuru, Kenya.
- Agbona and Niran headed down to the Startup Grind event to keep up to date with the Tech scene in Lagos.
- Tristan introduced the students of Stockholm University to Beam at their annual student orientation.
- Beam lovely Kévine brought the techies of Benin Republic up to speed with Beam and the up and coming Confidential Assets.
- Bobby Ong got up-close and personal with Alexander Zaidelson and Alex Romanov in the CoinGecko Podcast.
- Beam 2020 Week #6 — Covering February 3rd — February 9th 2020
- Coverage of Beam roadmap updates, and other happenings in Crypto News: Citigroup and Goldman Sachs Swap Equity On Blockchain + More News
- Battle Of The Privacy Coins: Five Month Update by Contrast Crypto gives some insight into privacy coins over the previous months
- Roadmap updates in Spanish, by the great Beam ambassador Fernando Molina:
La Fundación Beam presenta la actualización del Roadmap del Q1 2020 - Weekly Development Update in Russian: Еженедельный обзор конфиденциальной криптовалюты Beam от 7 Февраля 2020, by Alex Romanov
- Some updates for the Chinese Beamers on the state of Beam and the network: BEAM 的礼物：送您新版本安卓钱包, by First VIP
- Beam’s roadmap updates in China: Beam基金会：2020年第一季度路线图更新
Upcoming events:
- Paxful Peer to Peer Trading, Nairobi, Kenya | February 15th
- AMA with Huobi Nigerian community | 21st February
- Tezos meetup, Accra, Ghana | February 22nd
- Emerging Tech, Lagos, Nigeria | February 28th
- London Blockchain Week, UK | March 4th
- Coinfest UK, Manchester, UK | April 3rd
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
- Adshares, decentralized ad network, is accepting BEAM, so currently it’s possible to pay for advertising services using BEAM via NOWPayments gateway. See the announcement.
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!
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
