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 swap fees have significantly reduced
- Dozens of under-the-hood bug fixes you don’t want to know about, as Beam “just works”
Features:
- Enabled Offline transactions through the Lelantus MW protocol implemented at the last hard fork.
- For Offline transactions new “offline” addresses are supported: it includes all the necessary information for 10 payments so that a receiver doesn’t need to talk to the sender to create a transaction. Once the ten payments run out, the sender wallet will automatically request more payments from the receiver using SBBS. In case the Receiver is not online and not responding, the Sender wallet will show an indication that there are no more payments left and the user will request a new address using an external channel.
- Atomic swaps are significantly cheaper now due to SegWit support and a minimal fee rate is nicely recommended so that transactions will complete within a reasonable time
- Confirmation count is implemented for CLI wallet and in API to better align with exchanges
Improvements:
- Confidential Assets metadata is standardized. Read more here.
Fixes:
- CLI wallet: for AS with Electrum node - user can add any number of receiving and change addresses
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
- Offline transaction do not have payment proof (to be added in version 5.2)
Points to mention:
- Offline transaction fees are higher than Mimblewimble transactions and start from 0.01 BEAM per UTXO. The receiver pays his fee (per coin) when the coin is withdrawn from the shielded pool.
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