Welcome to our biweekly update on Beam! We hope all the Beamers are staying safe, healthy, and at home, as Team Beam and even the Beam Girl! Due to the current situation, the team is not planning to attend any offline events. Still, they will inevitably focus the efforts towards online activities for the foreseeable future, so stay tuned! Despite the “home-leaving limitations,” Beam development continues all the way! The progress is minutely shared in the regular weekly newsletters. Lately, they reported that there has been a lot of advancement regarding the upcoming hardfork. Wilke Trei has been hard at it, with the reference miner for Beamhash III now seamlessly switching between Beamhash I, II, and III, proof of work algorithms. Beamhash III will be more memory demanding than the last iteration and access the memory in larger batches, which should enable GPUs to utilize their bandwidth better. More info to follow!

Last week was mostly represented by meticulous testing for Double Doppler 4.2, which is now entering the final testing stages before the release. This version will include Atomic Swap Market Maker API, Wallet Channels, and many upgrades and improvements to Laser Beam. Furthermore, to help overcome some difficulties with node connectivity, which was making it challenging to sync Beam nodes in the mainland, Raskul and Gaoyi took the initiative to set up some mainnet community nodes. The Beam community in China now have dedicated node connectivity for wallet connections, with high compatibility from behind the GFW.

Generally, the team continues to work hard towards achieving all the substantial milestones in their roadmap. The work on Eager Electron 5.0 is presently ongoing. All in all, there were 11 commits this week.

Apart from the steady development, Beam has always had an extremely loyal community that supports the project and every single Beamer even during hard times. Check Beam Telegram chat to get acquainted with the fantastic community members! The main activities are now remote. Besides, Beam Africa is up-scaling the community by moving to Telegram from Whatsapp. This stemmed from some platform issues being faced, potential privacy improvements, and an overall increase in the ability to scale the community. Several Beam highlights appeared in different media channels worldwide. Obinna Nwankwo published an article to give newcomers all the necessary information about blockchain technology, the actual value of privacy, and how the Beam works! Also, a video about why privacy matters nowadays were created for you to understand that Beam is doing an incredibly important job! More cool news&updates you can find below. Stay with us!