Good Saturday, Beamers! The past two weeks were quite fruitful both for the development and social side of the project. Clear Cathode 3.1 for iOS was released with updated payment screens, main menu, transaction statuses, and icons updated to match the new design. In addition, transaction actions can now be triggered through haptic touch/3d touch. The Beam website is now available in Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and other languages.
The UX for Beam Wallet was improved, and currently, users can restore funds from a seed phrase. Moreover, many screens since the previous release were redesigned and languages added. They had 206 open issues in /beam, 34 open issues in /android-wallet, and 31 open issues in /ios-wallet; they also had 52 commits in /beam. Furthermore, a community member has released BeamPay — a payment processor for Beam that can be easily integrated into any online store. Integrate BeamPay and get paid in Beam, confidentially, and securely.
The social activity is represented by a substantial number of events, videos, and articles. Vlad Gelfer from Beam presented the work on Lelantus-MW, their new protocol, a hybrid of both lelantus and mimblewimble. Beam Africa’s Lead Ambassador Agbona Igwemoh got featured in a text interview during his trip to Port-Harcourt, to represent Beam at the StartupPortHarcourt and the Edge Conference. By the way, don’t miss upcoming events in Ukraine and India! Check a video by Boxmining “MimbleWimble Explained: Privacy is a MUST” and learn why “Monero, GRIN, and BEAM are crucial projects ahead of LIBRA’s launch” in a story by OurBitcoinNews.
The Beam community is growing as well as the number of subscribers in social networks. Stay with Paradigm and be on the same cryptowavelength!
Development
- UX++ for Beam Wallet (part 2) — A while ago when they’ve started to think about how to improve and redesign the mobile wallet (see Part 1 here) it became clear that one step won’t make the whole story. In the current release, they bring 3 big things under your fingerprints:
- Funds restore from a seed phrase: that’s right, you can restore any wallet given that you have the seed phrase kept somewhere. This fairly complicated and highly anticipated feature is available now and they dare to ask those who gave a lower score to the app to play with the app and to do the right thing ;)
- Many screens since the previous release were redesigned (see via the link above). Brand fresh touch will bring the eye-pleasing info in a more structured and more functional way.
- Languages (the community effort) the wallet is closer to the way of your thinking :) The challenges of this adventure and the names of the heroes participating will be covered in a separate article (stay tuned).
Improvements — Smaller things they couldn’t leave behind:
- Since they value every tap, some textual fields provide a nice way to reset the value with a single click (on iOS).
- On receive and send screens addresses are copiable with a long tap.
- Transactions can be searched by Kernel ID.
- Loading bar works smoother and is a bit more informative
- Online status works better when a phone is disconnected from the Internet
- Show Owner Key flow became much more informative
- On Android, the app doesn’t need to be restarted when a language is changed
- On Android, the app responsivity became much faster and usage feel became smoother due to significant architectural rework
- There’s much more to tell as the iOS sprints (2 in total) counted 80+ issues and Android sprints (2 in total) counted 100+ issues. Many fixes of typos, explanatory messages, elements placements, colors — all to make the app more eye-pleasing and more intuitive to use.
{General}
{Supported Platforms}
- All devices running iOS 11.0 and higher
{Features}
- When a crash occurs they’ll ask politely to submit the technical details, that will allow to investigate the issue and improve app’s stability
- Transactions screen was introduced to present the extended transactions info
{Improvements}
- Loading bar works smoother and is a bit more informative
- Payment proof screen, settings screens, transaction details screen, tag edit screen, main menu, transaction statuses and icons updated to match the new design
- Show owner key flow became more informative
- Transaction actions can be triggered through haptic touch / 3d touch
{Fixes}
- Many fixes of 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.
{Points to mention}
- DO NOT SIMULTANEOUSLY RUN TWO WALLETS INITIATED FROM THE SAME SEED PHRASE. No funds will be lost in any case, please read this article for full details.
- If you really want to run two wallets (read: geek mode), initiated from the same seed phrase, make sure each wallet is connected to the node configured with the owner key (which is derived from the seed phrase).
- Even if two wallets are connected with such a node which is properly configured with the owner key, the transaction history will not be syncronized among them (each wallet will see the correct balance but only its own transaction history).
- Beam 2019 Week #43 — ZK Proof Amsterdam — Covering October 21st — 27th, 2019 — Dev
- Starting development of a Web Wallet
- The website is now available in Chinese, Russian, Spanish and many more languages
- They had 213 open issues in /beam, 32 open issues in /android-wallet, and 28 open issues in /ios-wallet
- They had 74 commits in / beam
- Beam 2019 Week #44 — BeamPay — Covering October 28th — November 3rd, 2019 — Dev
- Starting development of a Web Wallet — Access the repo here
- They had released Clear Cathode 3.1, iOS
- They had 206 open issues in /beam, 34 open issues in /android-wallet, and 31 open issues in /ios-wallet
- They had 52 commits in / beam
Social encounters
- Beam 2019 Week #43 — ZK Proof Amsterdam — Covering October 21st — 27th, 2019
- Monero {XMR}, GRIN, and BEAM are crucial projects ahead of LIBRA’s launch | a story by OurBitcoinNews
- MimbleWimble Explained: Privacy is a MUST | a video by Boxmining
- Vlad Gelfer from Beam presenting their work on Lelantus-MW, their new protocol, a hybrid of both lelantus and mimblewimble. See post.
- Beam Africa’s Lead Ambassador Agbona Igwemoh got featured in a text interview while on his trip to Port-Harcourt to represent Beam at the StartupPortHarcourt and the Edge Conference (by Chigisoft).
“The goal is simple, speak to people about the need for privacy, and why we need to keep our transactions confidential. Also, educate people on how Beam is an investable vehicle and can serve well as a means to store value. While having these interactions, it will be great to onboard interested people into the Beam Africa community on WhatsApp, who will love to know more about Beam, as well as those that will like to buy and hodl Beam tokens or those who will simply trade Beam on the various crypto exchanges.”
- What a night for the CryptourUkraine in Kharkiv. Beam was there as well!
- New School Mining: What’s Next for Cryptocurrency and Blockchain | a story by Robert Yehling
- Gizlilik Odaklı BEAM CEO’su Özel Röportajda Merak Edilenleri Yanıtladı! | an interview in Turkish by Koinbulteni
Upcoming events:
- Crypto Revolution 2020 II, Dnipro, Ukraine, November 13th, 2019
- Binance & Beam Kyiv Meetup, Kyiv, Ukraine, November 21st, 2019
- Genesis DevCon 2019 — Bangalore, India, November 23–24th 2019 (to be confirmed)
- Beam Official Meetup — Bangalore, India, November 24th 2019
- Beam 2nd Official Meetup — Istanbul, Turkey, November 2019 (date to be confirmed)
Roadmap
- According to the recent Roadmap Update:
First, they decided to extend the scope of the Double Doppler release till the end of the year.
The release will include the following major features:
- A decentralized marketplace for Atomic Swaps in the Beam wallet
- Lelantus-MW on Testnet
- Confidential Assets POC/Testnet
- Multisig
- Hardware Wallets — Finalizing Trezor working on Ledger support
- Opt-in Audit — initial features
The next version, codenamed Eager Electron, will be released in the first quarter of 2020 and will contain the following items:
- Second Hard Fork (PoW update)
- Lelantus-MW on Mainnet
- Confidential Assets on Mainnet
- Tor/i2P integration
Some of the functionality that they originally planned for 2019 but was given lower priority compared to other tasks:
- GhostDAG research and POC — delayed to 2020
- Porting to Rust — they will seek the community help for this. Beam Foundation will issue grants to perform this task.
- Enhanced Wallet Security — delayed till they start working on Beam Business Wallet
- Lightning — while Lightning is a fascinating technology, they feel that Beam network is fast and private enough at the moment, so the work on full Lighting implementation is also delayed
- BLS Signatures — currently delayed, they will review this in the beginning of 2020
The next big thing — looking further into 2020!
The 2019 goal is to build a solid Layer 1 network for Beam. In 2020, they will spend more time on expanding Layer 2 and making Beam more of a platform.
Confidential Assets being the first step in this direction, the natural next steps is to offer full Smart Contract capabilities to the network.
Smart Contracts will allow for a multitude of applications, including stable coins, P2P lending, non-custodial exchanges, and other DeFi applications.
Mimblewimble does not support smart contracts per se, so the right way to add them to Beam is through a sidechain. They will be researching the existing projects to choose the right technology for the sidechain (can be Libra, Ton or something else). The high-level design goals are to create a sidechain with Turing-complete smart contracts, multiple assets with the ability for 1-to-1 pegging to assets on Beam mainnet, fast execution, and strong privacy.
It is their deep belief that any transfer and holding of value requires confidentiality. Confidentiality is needed for crypto coins, stable coins, utility tokens, tokenized securities, even for crypto kitties. The plan is to enable the issue of additional Beam Assets (or bAssets) on their blockchain.
To enable wide adoption, they will work in two directions:
- Bridges to Bitcoin, Ethereum and eventually other blockchains. Such Bridge will allow locking an asset on Ethereum and issuing a matching bAsset on Beam. The bAsset can then be traded between Beam wallets in full confidentiality
- bAsset Issuer, allowing a 3rd party to issue their own tokens on Beam blockchain. Such a token can represent any kind of value and have associated rules that will be enforced by the issuance server
Finance
Partnerships and team members
Here you can find the list of the shops and services that do accept Beam as a Payment Method. It is updated every week!
Every week new businesses are accepting Beam as a Payment Method. Here is the list of this week’s newcomers:
Currently, you can implement BeamPay on the e-commerce website to bill digital clients.
To discover how to proceed, please refer here.
The author is ready to provide assistance, please do not hesitate to reach him.
Rumors
- Beam Store Order Unpack | Beam T-Shirts | Beamprivacy — watch on Youtube.
- Picture from telegram chat:
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
