Welcome to our all-encompassing update on Beam! As always, Team Beam has been working assiduously, with some significant progress on current developments, and some exciting activities that were taking place in their various communities. Regular technical updates provided by the CTO Alex Romanov recommenced after a week-pause. In the recent report, he alleged that Atomic Swap API and HW wallet refactoring were completed, and now they are in active testing. In addition, he discusses the Web Wallet release, which like desktop and CLI wallets, also utilizes the SBBS system. The wallet channels are all implemented via SBBS push, without sending your wallet IP to any centralized server.
Furthermore, the third part of UX++ for Beam mobile wallets was published, highlighting some new changes. Among those, there is an easy onboarding process for those new to Beam with delayed seed verification and effortless access to the Beam community faucet. There is also an essential Dark Mode, wallet data import/export functions, for moving from phone to phone, the ability to restore from seed on the home screen, and several other enhancements added! Next, Raskull shared ‘skullog 1.0.1 Video Guides direct links so that everybody will have easy access to the useful material like payment proof & UTXO tutorial, Telegram community bot how-to, and a lot more! Additionally, this enthusiastic Beamer posted a series of articles regarding Beam. One of them explained Atomic Swaps in a comprehensive step-by-step guide on how to complete the swap offer via the wallet, without the need to publish the offer on the public board. Another spoke of the origins and peculiar properties of private assets and money.
It is worth mentioning that not only the development facet of a project is advancing, but there was also plentiful progress on the social side. Subreddit revamp with the help of Daria Tarakanova, Beam designer was aimed to provide users with a more friendly interface. They have added the all-important resources and links for Beam wallets, explorers, stats, and communities. All, of course, with Beam’s smooth on the eye colors. Subscribe, and get involved, as they build a more prominent presence with the new gorgeous sub. Even more about the Beam design: now you can read about the Beam logo evolution in a pictured story — don’t deny the pleasure of checking an article, carefully created by the designer, where she points out different stages towards the brilliant look the logo has now.
Moreover, a small shot from the Beam African community: they had a fantastic time at the Emerging Tech Event organized by TechCabal, where the ambassadors were present to outline Beam. Besides, Beam is now live on the Eazy Crypto NZ, and on the BITSPAY! Non-stop Beam expansion continues! The number of subscribers is increasing. Don’t forget to join the community and stay with us, not to miss anything!
Development
- According to CoinCodeCap: BEAM active devs on the codebase
- In the last 7 days — 9
- In the last 1 month — 12
- In the last 3 months — 15
- In the last 6 month — 21
- In the last 1 year — 38
1. BEAM SOLO MINING 10-STEP SETUP GUIDE
2. BEAM MINING RIG & POOL SETUP GUIDE
3. BEAM COMMUNITY TELEGRAM BOT HOW-TO
5. BEAM PAYMENT PROOF & UTXO GUIDE
6. MIMBLEWIMBLE EXPLAINED LIKE YOU’RE 12 by Midget
7. BEAM MOBILE WALLET FOR ANDROID
(Here you can find part 2 and part 1.)
- With a better balance between the risk and usability, after the installation, you’ll be painlessly directed to the main wallet screen. It is made in order to try the wallet first and the essential security measure (e.g. the seed phrase validation) will be postponed till enough balance is accumulated.
- The dark mode — not only conceptually related to privacy, but it also tunes the wallet into the better eye-pleasing mode at night time or under low light conditions.
- The data import/export functions that allow transferring your Beam wallet data from one device to the other.
- The team continuously listens for the new features suggestions on support and community Telegram channels. It was frustrating that to wipe off the wallet data, one needed to create a new seed phrase, re-initializing the wallet state. They’ve just introduced the item in Settings that wipes everything with a few taps (including the “Are you sure?” dialog).
- Reorganization of the screen into better-grouped sections.
- When the wallet is re-opened, you are required to enter the password. So far, if the password has been forgotten the only way to access your funds was to reinstall the wallet and initialize it from your seed phrase. From now on, you can just trigger the restore function from the password screen.
- Want to use the transaction details somewhere (amount, addresses, etc), but the “fancy”-looking transaction receipt doesn’t allow to copy-paste the actual numbers? Use transaction details from the contextual menu and prosper.
- For the impatient, transaction screen refreshes when you pull it down.
- To simplify the support procedure, the wallet version number is always shown on login and restore screens.
- All kinds of smaller fixes: typos, color corrections, elements’ placement, refined explanations were done to make the wallet more intuitive and simple to use.
- Beam 2020 Week #9 — Covering February 24th — March 1st, 2020
{R&D Updates}
- Testing and bug fixes on Double Doppler 4.2 continues
- Web wallet with new architecture has been completed and is currently being tested
- Work on Confidential Assets and Lelantus for Eager Electron 5.0 version — in progress
- HW wallet integration — in progress
- Beam Weekly Development Update 6 March 2020 — Weekly development update from Alex Romanov, Chief Technical Officer of Beam. This week, he discusses tasks completed and in test phase, including the Web Wallet release, which like desktop and CLI wallets, also utilizes the SBBS system. The wallet channels are all implemented via SBBS push, without sending your wallet IP to any centralized server.
Here are some highlights:
- Raskull shared: “Beam open-source pool calculated it’s first block last night. MySQL tables working as they should. Almost there, Beam fans.”
- Beam 2020 Week #10 — Covering March 2nd — March 8th 2020 — R&D Updates
- Testing continues for the upcoming Double Doppler 4.2 release
- Wallet Channels — testing
- Atomic Swaps API — testing
- Hardware Wallet refactoring — in progress
- Web Wallet — testing
Social encounters
- A series of captivating articles by Raskull:
“Year 10. Privacy: Beam. Having built an asset of value on the Mimblewimble Base Layer, Beam adds Lelantus optional quick delivery of assets (without the need for the receiving party to be online at the time of the transaction”
2. ‘skullog 1.0.3 Explaining Atomic Swaps — a comprehensive step-by-step guide on how to complete the swap offer via the wallet, without the need to publish the offer on the public board (for instance, if you have already agreed to send some Beam to a friend, who will be paying you in BTC).
3. ‘skullog 1.0.2 Finding a Beam txID — a little passage as an example of how to find the txID of a failed or expired Beam transaction within the Beam mobile wallet. (the similar process can be adopted for desktop GUI wallets)
- Exciting times last weekend at the Emerging Tech Event organized by TechCabal. Beam African ambassadors were there to represent Beam. Here are some highlights of the day — All smiles with Yele Bademosi, Director Binance Labs, and Founder of Microtraction. See post.
- According to Beam 2020 Week #9 — Covering February 24th — March 1st, 2020:
Some highlights from February:
- A busy month for Beam’s Lead Ambassador in Africa. Agbona has been pushing Beam and privacy to the limelight in the continent. Check out his interview with YellowCard, a local fiat onramp exchange
- Beam’s Romanov and Zaidelson teamed up in an AMA on r/CryptoCurrency, with some great questions and intrigue from the wider Crypto community
- Obinna represented at the Paxful event in Kenya, sharing his insight into the importance of privacy in cryptocurrencies adoption and growth in the continent
- Community Lead, Gus, joined as a volunteer at ETHLondon hackathon, to get the scoop on what’s happening in DeFi across the space, and how this is relevant to Beam’s future
- The Beam Foundation presented the community with the roadmap for moving forward in 2020
- Beam’s Discord underwent a revamp, with new roles, channels, and resources for the community
The above is just the tip of the iceberg, with much more taking place in the eventful month of Feb.
{Press}
- Our (Paradigm’s) article was also translated, and shared with the Chinese community, by Gaoyi
- Coinfly adds Beam to their Friends and Partners, and to their upcoming coins for mining
- Beam with a shout out in How will privacy change the Ethereum ecosystem?, by Toshi Times
- Beam listed on Bitribe Exchange, and added to Swap Space
- Check the latest report by The crypto Associate on a Beam, aiming to be an all-encompassing solution.
- Subreddit revamp with the help of Daria Tarakanova, Beam designer. They have added the all-important resources and links for Beam wallets, explorers, stats, and communities. All, of course, with Beam’s easy on the eye colors. Subscribe, and get involved, as they build a bigger presence with the new gorgeous sub.
- Another work on Daria’s behalf is Beam Logo: from magic to the new decade progress.
When most of the users hear “Beam”, they identify it with a prism. And this is absolutely true. But in the very beginning, Beam had a different vision of what should be the “Beam” brand.
- “Harry Potter times”
2. “The dark side of the moon times”
3. “Good old times”
4. The logo became more minimalistic and better recognizable.
The dark background wasn’t chosen by chance. It is strongly associated with privacy. Below are examples on the light colors:
5. Welcome to the new decade!
After a dozen releases for Desktop, Android and iOS wallets it was the time to improve the current logo. The logo should become even better balanced (or should be even said “pixel perfect”).
- Beam 2020 Week #10 — Covering March 2nd — March 8th 2020
The crypto industry saw a number of interesting regulatory developments that could set the stage for increased adoption in the years to come. One of the commercial courts of France classified Bitcoin as a currency, in a recent ruling between an exchange and an asset management firm. India’s Supreme Court lifted the circular set to curb cryptocurrency dealings for banks and regulated entities. While over in Korea, they passed legislation that will legalize and regulate cryptocurrencies and exchanges.
{Press}
- HASHR8 Privacy Coin Reviews: BEAM, keeping the ever-important mining community up to date and informed, by HASHR8
- Battle Of The Privacy Coins: Six Month Update, gives some updates on Beam and other privacy coins in the ongoing series, by Contrast Crypto
- A great summary of Beam and privacy coin advancements for February, in 头等仓研报：二月份隐私币重大进展总结, via First VIP
- The Beam Weekly Newsletter was translated into Chinese, thanks to Gaoyi
Upcoming events:
- Tech Talk 2.0, Abia, Nigeria | 13th Mar.
- DeFi Africa 2020, Nairobi, Kenya | 17th Mar.
- Port-Harcourt City CybCon, Port-Harcourt, Nigeria | 21st Mar.
- Coinfest UK, Manchester, UK | Apr. 3rd
- Cu Ota Tech Expo, Lagos Nigeria | 27th Mar.
- Africa Blockchain Week, Lagos, Nigeria | 28th Mar. — 5th Apr.
- AMA with Binance South Africa | Mar. 21st
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
- SimpleSwap created a dedicated article, where you will learn what is BEAM, which main characteristics it has and how to use it on Simple Swap.
- BEAM is now live on the Eazy Crypto NZ!
- BEAM has been listed on BITSPAY!
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
- “Keep an eye on Beam with social engagement hitting a weekly high on 163,166 engagements within a single hour.” — LunarCrush points out.
- Xtrading Crypto Analysis Tools compared two top mimblewimble coins mentions in Twitter: GRIN and BEAM
- Did you have a chance to catch an amount from RED ENVELOPE? Everyone can create own RED ENVELOPE thank to vsnation! Join @BeamPrivacy to catch it!
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
