BEAM Roadmap Update

Published on: 18.06.2021

BEAM has made a lot of progress since taking 2021 and now they share with you what’s next for Beam.

🔹Beam — Q2 2021

Fierce Fermion 6.0 a.k.a. BeamX opens the door to the Confidential DeFiera.

Hard Fork

The brand new Beam Wallet, nodes and APIs released for all platforms ahead of our third Hard Fork that will be triggered at 1280000 blockchain height. No consensus change will occur, but rather infrastructural upgrades to enable Smart Contracts (a.k.a. Shaders) in Beam Wallets and Nodes. You read it right, we’ve created a nice full-stack framework to build confidential decentralized apps and financial instruments. WASM (and anything that compiles to it) was selected for the contracts’ native code, it will be executed by the Beam Virtual Machine (BVM) running in… (you’ve guessed right) both Beam Wallets and Nodes!

Besides the Hard Fork support, the wallet is turning into a massive suite of tools, therefore to be called Wallet Suite. Let me walk you through some of the innovations.

Send and Receive Screens

They know, it takes time to make it right and by the second “it” they mean “way too many addresses” which got lots of our users confused in 5.x versions but no more! In 6.0 the screens are significantly simplified and only one address is presented at a time.

The “regular” address internally carries both online and offline addresses and the wallet is smart enough to try them both in the aforementioned order. Not only that, but the wallet will automatically pick the best UTXO to increase the un-linkability and overall blockchain privacy level.

Confidential Assets

The long-awaited Confidential Assets now show up in the wallet so that you can send and receive any asset, that can be issued by locking 3000 BEAM.

Every created asset can be seen on the Beam blockchain explorer.

🔹Beam — Q3 2021

Address Book

Simplified Send and Receive screens inspired us to re-vamp (read: significantly simplify) the address book. As addresses are only relevant in the context of the concrete wallet, it makes much more sense to put any amount of addresses under the same contact. The default address for each transaction type (e.g. Regular Privacy and Max Privacy) will be shown for every address and so, the entire address history in detail.

Geeky yet important detail: for every contact, its “counterpart” address generated by your wallet will be kept behind the scenes automatically so that your transactions will always appear under the consistent naming scheme in every peer wallet.

Web Wallet

The common expectation in the DeFi space is to operate a wallet that doesn’t require (well, almost) any installation and here we go: the wallet as a chrome extension will join the mobile and desktop wallets! Beam Web wallet will act in a very similar way to the Metamask wallet for Ethereum. This will allow Beam to integrate with existing products in the DeFi space, bringing easy interoperability to the ecosystem.

Swap with Confidential Assets

Confidential Assets are first-class citizens of the Beam DeFi ecosystem. Therefore any Beam Confidential Asset can be swapped for LTC, BTC, QTUM, DASH, DOGE, ETH, DAI, and USDT.

What about swapping Confidential Assets with BEAM? Easy, it looks like an atomic swap (same UX) but under the hood, it will be a single “regular” transaction (as there is no difference between the currencies represented in various UTXO on the Beam private blockchain). The process is super fast and the cost is much lower compared to cross-chain atomic swaps.

🔹BeamX — Q4 2021

DAPP Store Becomes Decentralized

Not only the apps but their distribution will become dynamic and fully decentralized. Meaning:

Anyone will be able to list a DAPP in a fully censorship-resistant way (e.g. no one will be able to remove a DAPP from the store).
Still, to contribute to the overall trust, a verified badge will be added to specific DAPPs. An exact set of criteria and probably the apps themselves will be approved by the BeamX DAO.
There will be no need to upgrade the wallet to install/update any of the DAPPs (similar to the way we do not take any action in the browser to see the most updated version of any website).

Decentralized Bridges

The bigger the mission, the longer it takes. We believe that bridges to private blockchains require true decentralization. While various federated bridges are being developed rapidly, the team focuses on the truly decentralized Ethereum bridges and it takes a bit longer, so pull back and relax, until the sacred moment when you’ll be able to confidentially transact and trade real-world ERC20 tokens on the Beam blockchain.

Our bridges will allow moving assets from Ethereum and later Polkadot, BSC, and practically any other network that supports smart contracts, to Beam and back! Tokens locked on the source chain are emitted as Confidential Assets on the Beam blockchain and then burned when the assets are moved back to the original chain. The bridge’s architecture uses the ability of smart contracts to verify the correctness of a chain of blocks on each chain, thus synchronizing the states between the chains and proving the correctness of bridge operation.

Information regarding the state updates is provided in the form of transactions by an independent trustless broker using optimistic rollups. The broker pays transaction fees on each chain and in return collects bridge fees paid by the users willing to transfer their assets from one chain to another. To guarantee the honesty of the transactions, the broker locks a deposit that can be collected by the provider of the correct state proof in case of a dispute.

Beam roadmap comes with its inherently dynamic nature: it’s paved with a multitude of surprises, therefore the delivery timeline is continuously reorganized. One thing is clear though: the tech team always works at its best effort.