This was again a good space, with many exciting news about the on-going developments in Beam wallet and towards the 8.0 hard fork adding EVM compatibility! These are my notes about what I heard. Enjoy! 😎 ▶ On recent events - Many things happening everywhere. It seems that the world is getting crazier by the day... 😥 - For Beam Team members living in Israel, things are a bit more stable now. Alex leaves far enough from the tense parts of Israel. But Amir leaves in a place that is not as peaceful, so he is quite busy with family and home. - The craziest thing that happened recently? Maybe CZ and Binance getting on of the top 5 highest fines ever in the world (wsj.com/finance/currencies/b…)! - Another crazy thing? Blast (@Blast_L2 blast.io), a deposit-only L2 contract, with a simple multi-sig... that has already reached $443 Million in TVL! - Also, some Bitcoin transactions were blocked by miners... because of OFAC list! That's not very "censorship-resistant"... (b10c.me/observations/08-miss…)! - Lastly, a very sophisticated exploit just happened on Kyber: The hacker used a flash loan to move the liquidity to a place where there was none and exploited there a very special bug possible on zero liquidity (xitter.cf/0xdoug/status/17276135…). ▶ On privacy - An article in Crypto News: "An in-depth look at the regulatory landscape of privacy coins". It's a bit shallow and its TL;DR could be "Nobody likes privacy coins" (crypto.news/an-in-depth-look…). - An other article from freedom.tech was more interesting: "Digital privacy in the age of Bitcoin". It talks about finance surveillance and has many links to laws an regulations (freedom.tech/digital-privacy…). - In general terms, there is an on-going attack on privacy, regardless of blockchain. It's not only about crypto. It's about controlling more and more of people's finance. ☹️ - The dystopian view on CBDC is very dark. But it seems that only the very few people involved in privacy can actually see that. - And many attacks and phishing scams are based on the fact that most people don't know or understand what technology can do. There is a general awareness campaign that is not being done... - By instance, we can see new privacy settings in the latest version of Firefox. That's some progress. But at the end of the day, Google still controls everything. - Giving up on some privacy is often done because it brings convenience, and people don't seem to worry about that. ▶ On Beam development - Many interesting updates are planned to the Beam wallet. A forum thread has been made for discussing the ideas (forum.beam.mw/t/desktop-wall…). - It's currently called "version 7.5/8.0": Because, some changes in the wallet are not related to the Hard Fork 8.0 and they might be released before. - One first important change: The wallet becomes multi-account! 🎉 - Within the same wallet app, the user can switch wallet accounts (where one account = one seed phrase). - So the terminology used is "wallet" for the app, and "account" for the seed-related things. - And when your integrated node is already synchronized, any new account will copy it and thus will not require additional synchronization! 👍 - Another change is that the main window will allow selecting the network (mainnet or dappnet), with a different color scheme then applied to the whole wallet. - Also, in previous version, when creating a new wallet, the default option was to use an integrated node. Because of that, new users had to wait hours for the first synchronization, which was a very frustrating experience for on-boarding users. - In the new version, the wallet will use a remote node until the local node is fully synchronized. - That way, new users will get to the main wallet window right away, without needing to wait for the initial synchronization to conclude. 🥳 - Of course, for advanced users, the full control will still be possible through the config files. - This is a brilliant way to "hide" the complexity for the user, making it easy for them, while still using the best practice. - In the case of restoring an existing wallet with this method, the balance might be incomplete until the end of the full sync. But that will not prevent from performing transactions and using the wallet. - Another important change is the presentation of the DApps. - Today, the Beam ecosystem has a lot of DApps and Alex thinks that most users are interested in these DApps rather than only in basic transactions. - So, in the next version, the bottom part of the main screen will now show the favorites DApps. - A "Swaps" button will be added next to the "Send" and "Receive" buttons. It will lead to the Asset swaps and Atomic swaps functionalities. - The DApp Store will also get rid of all the centralized parts and will become fully decentralized. - Some .dapp files will be provided with the main install and other DApps will be available through the DApp Store. - To allow the multi-account management, a new "Profile" button on the top right will be added. - And we are discussing the idea of allowing adding a cool profile image there (like BeamBots, Beam Girl, etc.). - We could also add other functionalities there: Like showing there the public offline address, or other ideas we can have. - A consequence of all that reorganization, is that the entire left bar will be gone! - And indeed, it really is a good time now for such a refresh of the wallet GUI! ▶ On questions from the community 👉 About project financing in 2024: - On January 3rd 2024, we will have halving and the treasury payments will stop. How will we pay for anything after that? - By the way: It also also means we will be 5 years old! We should have a party! 🍾🥂 - Several things: Even with the treasury payments, the low current price did not really "paid" anything for the last year. Most of the work being done currently is mainly voluntary or for very small bounties. - Indeed, the original Beam Team is still around and even if they don't spend so much time, they are still participating and helping. - The remaining funds from the Foundation will soon be moved to the DAO vault. - Anyway, we need to try to attract more developers from the community. - The Beam explorer, by instance, needs work and that work could be associated to a bounty. 👉 About running a miner from inside a wallet: - We used to have that at launch but it became not very useful when the hashrate became too high. - Maybe now, with better GPUs and lower hashrate, could it be useful? Not sure... - However, the software is available and it works. It's just maybe not as conveniently packaged. 👉 About smart contract support for Laser Beam: - We see many recent news about the Lightning Network, and many are not good. - Laser Beam is inspired by LN. It's a direct payment channel between two wallets, which have both locked some amount in a smart contract. - Today Laser Beam is only available through the CLI wallet. It was never integrated in the GUI wallet because we did not have an actual use case for it! - So now, do we have a real and interesting use case for it? Is it really worth the work to have it available in the GUI? 👉 About the wallet's main screen becoming overwhelming for new users: - Well, it depends if we find the right balance. By instance, by only showing the favorite DApps and not all of them. - Anyway, designs will be shared with the community so that we can discuss about it. 👉 About the proposal for a DAO vote for redistributing the BeamX liquidity rewards: - There are no additional steps before going to a vote. The only thing that is now needed is some coordination with Amir who is also facilitator for the publishing the votes. 👉 About Beam explorer: - It was been updated, but a bit too slowly for Vladi who decided to make his own explorer with a lot of information in it! - That prototype could now be integrated in the current explorer. - And that's a work that is open for anybody who wants to work on it! A bounty could even be offered for it. - So let's open the bounty and see who is interested! 👉 About Beam DEX listing with CoinGecko: - Does anybody know of another small DEX that have been listed? - We would probably have difficulties to convince them while the volume is still low... 👉 About leverage trading and limit orders in the DEX: - Yes, it could be done. But should it be the DEX itself? Or better in some third party application, on top of the DEX? - Such ideas are open to discussion and if someone is interested it could be a good project for entrepreneurs or community. 👉 About decentralized bridges (by instance cbridge): - Alex will need to look into it (cbridge.celer.network). - There used to be a design for a fully decentralized bridge between Beam and Ethereum, but the team met some difficulties along the way, probably by being too strict on the confirmations and verification (i.e. thus becoming a long and expensive bridge). - Maybe it should be restarted, in a more "optimistic" approach (to limit the costs on the Ethereum side). - Until then, the current bridge is partially centralized but it does work, it is fast, cheap and it can be used with ease. - In general terms, bridges have the same issues as L2: Trust reduction vs Convenience. ▶ Conclusion - Many exciting things being developed! - And a recap for next week's actions: 1) Advance the DAO vote proposal. 2) Propose a bounty for the explorer. 3) Share updates on the wallet design and the EVM layer. END ❤