TL;DR Release Highlights:
- Shaders (a.k.a. Smart Contracts) are paving the way to Confidential DeFi. Expect multiple Distributed Applications (DAPPs) executed in Beam Nodes and Wallets.
- The hard fork to enable Shaders will take place at block 1135300. To continue using your funds please upgrade your wallets prior to reaching the height!
- Confidential Assets have arrived in the Beam Desktop Wallet! Send and receive with regular or max privacy, get payment proof, see the balance and extended info: we’ve covered pretty much everything to help CAs become first-class citizens.
- Massive update with over 180 tasks and bugs at the time of writing to make “everything just work” yet again.
Improvements:
- [node] Embeds a Beam Virtual Machine (BVM) which can run Contract Shaders
- [wallet] Runs App Shaders to enable in-wallet DAPPs (the first apps are already in the works and will be announced very soon)
- [wallet] Embedded DAPP store with the first proof-of-concept DAPPs
- [wallet] Can send and receive Confidential Assets
- [wallet] Send and Receive screens became simple to use, thanks to every community member who pushed us to rework the address-related logic
Known limitations:
- When using active laser beam channels the CLI wallet should not be offline for over 24 hours
- Once generated, do not offer the same offline address to multiple senders of payments
Points to mention:
- The DAPPs will become ready to use when the hard fork height is reached.
- Upon using Atomic Swaps with ETH, DAI, WBTC, and USDT, users will have to create an account on Infura.
- After the hard fork LelantusMW transaction fees will only be paid on UTXO outputs, with no fee for UTCO inputs. This will be paid by the sender.
- Fees for general (Mimblewimble) transactions will increase to 100k Groth (an increase of 1000x). This increase is in order to protect against the threat of spamming attacks, whilst keeping the fee minimal for users.
- The sender of funds to a receiver’s Public Offline Address might be able to know that those funds are later being used by the receiver. Beam wallet and Beam explorer do not expose such functionality but it's possible to derive this information by analyzing the Blockchain.
For a more comprehensive list of the tasks accomplished please here and here.