Roadmap

According to the recent Roadmap Update:

First, they decided to extend the scope of the Double Doppler release till the end of the year.

The release will include the following major features:

A decentralized marketplace for Atomic Swaps in the Beam wallet Lelantus-MW on Testnet Confidential Assets POC/Testnet Multisig Hardware Wallets — Finalizing Trezor working on Ledger support Opt-in Audit — initial features

The next version, codenamed Eager Electron, will be released in the first quarter of 2020 and will contain the following items:

Second Hard Fork (PoW update) Lelantus-MW on Mainnet Confidential Assets on Mainnet Tor/i2P integration

Some of the functionality that they originally planned for 2019 but was given lower priority compared to other tasks:

GhostDAG research and POC — delayed to 2020 Porting to Rust — they will seek the community help for this. Beam Foundation will issue grants to perform this task. Enhanced Wallet Security — delayed till they start working on Beam Business Wallet Lightning — while Lightning is a fascinating technology, they feel that Beam network is fast and private enough at the moment, so the work on full Lighting implementation is also delayed BLS Signatures — currently delayed, they will review this in the beginning of 2020

The next big thing — looking further into 2020!

The 2019 goal is to build a solid Layer 1 network for Beam. In 2020, they will spend more time on expanding Layer 2 and making Beam more of a platform.

Confidential Assets being the first step in this direction, the natural next steps is to offer full Smart Contract capabilities to our network.

Smart Contracts will allow for a multitude of applications, including stable coins, P2P lending, non-custodial exchanges, and other DeFi applications.

Mimblewimble does not support smart contracts per se, so the right way to add them to Beam is through a sidechain. They will be researching the existing projects to choose the right technology for the sidechain (can be Libra, Ton or something else). The high-level design goals are to create a sidechain with Turing-complete smart contracts, multiple assets with the ability for 1-to-1 pegging to assets on Beam mainnet, fast execution, and strong privacy.

It is their deep belief that any transfer and holding of value requires confidentiality. Confidentiality is needed for crypto coins, stable coins, utility tokens, tokenized securities, even for crypto kitties. The plan is to enable the issue of additional Beam Assets (or bAssets) on their blockchain.

To enable wide adoption, they will work in two directions: