Hello, and welcome to our biweekly update on Beam, which has already become a wonderful tradition! These weeks were represented by a pretty vivid development and an extremely active community life. The latest Beam wallet comes with push notifications and price indicators, without any privacy leaks. Now you can receive information on BTC or USD prices, transaction and address status, and wallet releases. With the messages being pushed out via SBBS it avoids privacy leaks that are often found when wallets pull the price and other data from a source like an exchange. They were designed in this way to protect against such leaks, as privacy is of the utmost importance to Beam, as you all know. Besides, one of the most critical parts of the Beam ecosystem is connectivity. Without the ability to get your wallet connected to the Beam network, there would be no network! In recognition of this essential link, Raskul continues to set up a series of dedicated nodes around the globe. These are always online peers to allow for both remote connectivity to a node and to help them get up to sync with their own nodes. Development progress and testing for the upcoming fork are well underway, and the current focus for R&D. Some substantial consensus upgrades are coming with the hardfork, such as newborn BeamHash III, activating support for confidential assets, Lelantus Mimblewimble, and support for one-sided payments. All in all, there were 120 commits on GitHub during the past two weeks.
Beam community efforts are currently limited by online format; however, the team continues to support and educate all the community members. Raskul shared a “how-to” video guide on setting up and conducting Bitcoin to Beam atomic swaps without the need for a third party, preserving the anonymity and ensuring financial freedom. Another video guide by Raskul touched upon the details on setting a node on a VPS. Furthermore, there were numerous social media highlights, including Beam shout out in This Week in Blockfolio Signal, LunarCrush nomination of “the token of the day”, and multiple international news coverages. Moreover, on the community front, some significant initiatives appeared taking shape from Beam Africa, driving users to the Beam mobile wallet, educating them on how it works, and bringing in ever valuable feedback. The community tends to grow in social networks and chats, empowering the incredible Beam ecosystem! We wish all the Beamers to stay safe! See You in two weeks!
Development
- Beam Notifications Unpacked — The latest Beam wallet comes with push notifications and price indicators, without any privacy leaks.
What types of notifications are there?
- BTC or USD prices — Beam wallet can now show your balance in BTC or USD. These prices are pushed out to conveniently see how much your Beam is worth, or how much you’re sending.
- Transaction and address status — Get notified when transactions have completed, and addresses have expired
- Wallet Releases — Always have the latest and greatest of what Beam has to offer.
How do they work?
With the messages being pushed out via SBBS it avoids privacy leaks that are often found when wallets pull the price and other data from a source like an exchange. They were designed in this way to protect against such leaks, as privacy is of the utmost importance to Beam, as you all know.
Download it now and make it yours!
- Beam 2020 Week #17 — Fork Incoming — Covering April 20th — April 26th 2020
R&D Updates
- Mainnet — Double Doppler 4.2.8646 — released
- Eager Electron 5.0 — testing commencing
- Week in commits: 49
- Atomic Swaps API — released with ongoing improvements
- Web Wallet — testnet incoming
- Beam 2020 Week #18 — The Network — Covering April 27th — May 3rd 2020
R&D Updates
Development progress and testing for the upcoming fork is well underway, and the current focus for R&D. There are some absolutely huge consensus upgrades coming with it, so if you haven’t already, take a look at what it brings with it in the announcement, and last weeks newsletter.
- Week in commits: 48
- Eager Electron 5.0 — testing underway
- Atomic Swaps API — released with ongoing improvements
- Web Wallet — testnet incoming
What does it mean for users?
Users will need to update their wallets. They will be able to do so both before and after the hard fork (although recommended before). The hard fork wallet release, Eager Electron 5.0, will be released with ample time prior to the hard fork. This will enable users to update in advance, and seamlessly switch over at the appropriate block height.
What does it mean for miners?
Similarly for users, miners will be able to update their wallets and nodes prior to the hard fork, and keep on hashing on after the fork. They will coordinate with the Beam mining pools to ensure the transition is as smooth as possible for those mining to a pool. More details for miners can be found here.
What does it mean for Beam?
As mentioned, this is a huge event for Beam, and with it comes some incredible network upgrades. One of the bigger changes is to the mining algorithm, from BeamHash II to BeamHash III.
- Confidential Assets:
Confidential Assets (CA) will extend Beam and allow trading of additional kinds of assets on the Beam blockchain with the same scalability and confidentiality of the Mimblewimble protocol. It will allow the issuance of Confidential Synthetics (commodities like gold, stable coins, digital assets such as shares, stocks, and bonds, etc.), Confidential Wrapped Assets (BTC, ETH, etc.), and Community Coins/Tokens. The CA’s will benefit from the incredible usability, privacy and scalability of Beam, being first class citizens in the wallets. They are an integral building block, laying the foundations for the Beam Confidential DeFi Infrastructure being built out. Something we’re incredibly excited to see coming to fruition so fast! - Lelantus Mimblewimble:
Lelantus Mimblewimble adds an extra layer of privacy when needed, to help break the linkability, and protect against such things as the flashlight attack. This is achieved through users having the option to recycle their funds via a shielded pool, to increase the anonymity set substantially, and allowing for greater privacy protections. - One-Sided Payments:
As surely you are aware, transactions of Beam are currently interactive, given the nature of the underlying Mimblewimble protocol. For some situations, this can pose an inconvenience, especially for those that are used to the way Bitcoin and most cryptocurrency transactions work today. One-sided payments, via Lelantus Mimblewimble, will allow for users to make a transaction without the need to interactively construct it with the receiver. Lelantus Mimblewimble’s primary addition is privacy, but with it comes the useful ability to make these one-sided payments.
As you can see, the upcoming hard fork has some great feature upgrades for Beam that they are all very excited about! If you have any questions regarding the fork, want to know more about issuing confidential assets, or want to let them know your thoughts, jump into the chat and let them know.
Social encounters
- Bitcoin to Beam in-wallet Atomic Swaps by Raskul — How-to video guide on setting up and conducting Bitcoin to Beam atomic swaps without the need for a third party, preserving your anonymity and ensuring your financial freedom.
- Beam Guide: Set up a Beam node on a VPS — An amazing video guide by Raskul explaining the details on setting a node on a VPS.
- Beam Hard Fork to Update PoW Algorithm — and article regarding the previously announced second hard fork scheduled for June 28. To recall:
Some important changes resulting from the hard fork upgrade include:
- Proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm will change from BeamHash II to BeamHash III.
- Activating support for confidential assets
- Lelantus Mimblewimble will also activate support
- Support for one-sided payments
Another article highlighting the same topic can be found via the link.
- Crypto Mining Blog keeping the miners up to date with what’s to come with the Beam Hard Fork
- BTC manager giving their insights, and some great Beam art, on the upcoming fork
- Beam Hard Fork announcement for the Spanish speaking community in both Territorio Blockchain, and Motril Digital, by the great Beam Ambassadors Fernando and Óscar
- Some great coverage of Beam for the French speakers among us, in Beam : un hard fork en juin pour le Bitcoin anonyme, by Rémy R.
- More great coverage for Beam ever-growing Chinese Beamers;
BEAM | Eager Electron 5.0 进展顺利
隐私代币项目Beam预计于6月28日第二次硬分叉
Beam宣布将于区块高度777777执行第二次硬分叉 - With the continued growth among the Chinese community comes increased online presence with Beamprivacy 的文章
- Also the exciting launch of Beam’s Wechat news account, you can find, subscribe, and keep up to date with all of the news in Chinese.
Wechat ID: gh_a28ca2d84d7c - Beam with a shout out in This Week in Blockfolio Signal
- Beam 2020 Week #18 — The Network — Press
- Beam added to Coin Fair Value, giving P/E equivalent and fundamental investing data of cryptocurrencies, props to Lilbit and Vsnation for making it happen
- A look at Beam and Grin, and wether they fit the Stock-to-Flow Cross Asset Model, by Bearcub
- Keep a track of the upcoming Hard Fork with the countdown, from Nicehash
- A great breakdown of Mimblewimble and Beam, by CryptoNewsNet
- An excellent overview of Beam for the Italian community, by Criptonauta
- Beam Hard Fork featured in recent Pizza edition
- On the community front, some great initiatives appeared taking shape from Beam Africa, driving users to the Beam mobile wallet, educating them on how it works, and bringing in ever valuable feedback.
- LunarCrush named Beam the coin of the day.
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.
{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
- BEAM will be launching soon in early access on Cruxpool. Discover the team behind this amazing project. Privacy, hidden data, Mimblewimble and more, dive with Cruxpool in this short video that will cover the basics of this ingenious Blockchain.
- BEAM on Swapzone. Come and check it out 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
- Now you can pay with Beam to recharge your phone with Hablax. Hablax offers its customers International Calling, Mobile Recharges and SMS from App and Web.
- BEAM was listed on Cryptwerk.com.
Other
- Beam Bot is alive and tipping! After much anticipation, the tip bot has made its way over to the BEAM discord where tips are flying and red envelopes are dropping. Join Discord community via the link.
- Amir Aaronson thanked F2pool for supporting BEAM from the very first 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
