Hello, and welcome to our regular biweekly update on Beam! We wish everyone to stay safe and healthy. Team Beam is operating extremely hard on the major releases as a very significant milestone is about to happen. It was recently announced that Beam’s second hard fork is expected to take place on June 28, 2020. PoW algorithm will change from BeamHash II to BeamHash III, which will enable fuller GPU card capabilities.

Moreover, the June hard fork will provide some new features like confidential assets, one-sided payments, and the support of privacy protocol, Lelantus MW. To recall, the first planned BEAM Hard Fork was successful. The fork occurred at block 321,321 on August 19, 2019, and everything went as expected. Previously, the fork changed the mining algorithm from Beam Hash I to Beam Hash II. For a new upgrade, compatible releases of node, wallet, and miner will be versioned Eager Electron 5.0. The node and the Desktop Wallet binaries will be released around the end of May to allow everyone approximately 30 days to update to the new version; the Mobile Wallets for Android and iOS will be delivered a little later. All users will only need to upgrade their software to the latest version, so stay informed with the news and guidelines on the official channels.

Furthermore, team Beam was busy working on the significant launch of Double Doppler 4.2. That established several fresh improvements, including decentralized notifications, Atomic Swap Market Maker API to obtain info, and take part in Atomic Swaps easily. Don’t forget to check it out! All in all, there were 60 commits last week; the biweekly-period dynamics are accessible in our update.

Although these are not the easiest times for people worldwide, the Beam community remains loyal, strong, and supportive. There were many media highlights, videos, and articles. A great interview with Alexander Zaidelson, Beam Business Lead, was published in Japanese for the Beam Japanese community and was hugely covered on Yahoo Finance, Investing.com, Gunocy, and others. Also, the second video in a series about why privacy matters was posted recently in Beam Twitter to keep the community updated with all the latest industry news. Besides, in the report for week 15, they shared a short overview of the shops and services that do accept Beam as a Payment Method. Don’t miss it out! The number of subscribers in main Beam social networks and chats keeps growing. Read the details below!