This 5.0 (Eager Electron) release paves the way for Beam towards a confidential finance ecosystem, enabling multiple features in CLI that will be introduced later in UI wallets such as confidential assets, breaking linkability and many others.
After Beam blockchain will reach the block 690000 (testnet) the upgrade to 5.0 is mandatory to access your funds.
Important information for Exchanges and Mining Pools: Confidential Assets-related functionality (e.g. send/receive etc.) is disabled by default. To enable explicitly, use --enable_assets command-line option when running BEAM API or BEAM wallet CLI. Please read the complete tutorial here.
Features:
- [miner, node] BeamHash III - the new, the great and the last POW algorithm for Beam
- [cli] break transactions linkability with Lelantus MW (for Beam and any CA)
- [cli] Non-interactive transactions
- [cli, api] issue, burn and transfer confidential assets (disabled by default)
Improvements:
- [node] added an option to manually specify preferred peers for rare edge cases
- [api] The number of confirmations is now available to the transaction sender and receiver
- [desktop wallet] introduced new and more informative “failing” status for Atomic Swaps when the transaction is rolling back
- [desktop wallet] The default offer expiration for Atomic Swaps was extended from 30 minutes to 12h
Fixes:
- [desktop wallet] Wallet update notification will not be displayed if a wallet was… (surprise) already updated.
- [api] swap_offer_list command provides the list of offers as expected.
Other:
- [desktop wallet] Infrastructure change: the UI code was extracted to a separate repository to speed-up the development and QA process in the future
Known limitations:
- When using active laser beam channels the wallet should not be offline for over 24 hours
- Atomic Swaps of Confidential Assets with BEAM/BTC/LTC/QTUM will be released later on
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.
For a more comprehensive list of the tasks accomplished please read here: https://github.com/BeamMW/beam/projects/28