TL; DR Release Highlights:
- Offline transactions add the option to use offline addresses: no need to wait for the receiver to come online anymore!
- Atomic swaps have just become cheaper
- Dozens of under-the-hood bug fixes you don’t want to know about as Beam “just works”
- Desktop BEAM wallet welcomes the first external contributors: job done well by SomethingGettingWrong and sgaragagghu!
Features:
- Enabled Offline transactions through the Lelantus MW protocol implemented at the last hard fork.
- All the screens (e.g. send, receive, transaction details, transaction statuses, Atomic Swaps offers) got a nice facelift so that the information is presented in a much better-structured way
- “Offline” address type includes all the necessary information for up to 20 payments so that a receiver doesn’t need to talk to the sender to create a transaction
- Atomic swaps not only became significantly cheaper due to SegWit implementation but also the minimum fee rate is nicely recommended so that transaction will complete within a reasonable time
Known limitations:
- Once generated, do not offer the same offline address to multiple senders of payments
- Offline transaction do not have payment proof (to be added in version 5.2)
Points to mention:
- In case a mobile wallet is connected to a random node and the user has both mobile and desktop wallets that are using the same seed phrase, the funds sent to the desktop wallet won’t appear on the mobile wallet. If the desktop wallet is running a local node, it will see funds sent to both wallets. The reason is that the local node (integrated into the desktop wallet) always monitors the blockchain for UTXOs related to the seed of the wallet. The mobile wallet does not run a local node and thus can only monitor transactions sent to its specific SBBS addresses. Of course, no funds will be lost in any event.
- BEAM wallets won’t display received Confidential Assets and amounts kept in the shielded pool. Please use CLI ar API till the future notice.
- Offline transaction fees are higher. The receiver pays his fee (per coin) when the coin is withdrawn from the shielded pool. To keep the anonymity set to the best value at any given time, the max privacy coins may remain in the shielded pool until the receiver decides to spend them. Hence, the withdrawal fee for each Max Privacy coin can be paid when the receiver initiates the outgoing transaction of his own.
For a more comprehensive list of the tasks accomplished please read here
Verifying release binaries
PGP key: "A6C6 2C9F 5593 1860 AFF8 3BBB 997E AB9F 3DF7 F375"
- Go to https://keybase.io/beammw and get the Public PGP key.
- Download the signed binary file (with extension .asc) you want to verify.
- Verify the signature using PGP Suite or any other PGP verification tools