Beam has released updates on the execution of its second hard fork, which they had previously announced in their roadmap.
According to the Beam update, the upgrade is set to take place at Block Height 777777. The tentative date for reaching the height is on June 28 this year.
Need for users to upgrade
A Medium blog post carried further details of the upcoming hard fork. As a result of the updates, older wallet versions would stop working once the Block Height 777777 is reached. Therefore, users need to upgrade their wallets to version 5.0 or higher to gain access to their funds.
Release of nodes and wallets
By the end of May, there would be a release of the node and desktop wallet binaries. This will give users enough time (almost 30 days) to upgrade to the new version. Eager Electron 5.0 is the current version for the compatible releases of the node wallet and miner. However, there will not be any simultaneous release of the mobile wallets for Android and iOS, which will take place later.
The node and wallet binaries will support the current blockchain. After reaching the target block height, these binaries will also automatically switch to the new consensus mechanism. This, however, does not require any user intervention. Also, this process will not have any impact on the funds. It is also important for all users to upgrade their software to the latest version.
Major changes due to the hard fork
Some important changes resulting from the hard fork upgrade include:
- Proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm will change from BeamHash II to BeamHash III.
- Activating support for confidential assets
- Lelantus Mimblewimble will also activate support
- Support for one-sided payments
BeamHash III: great improvement for miners
BeamHash III is going to be a great improvement to the Beam mining network. This is because it is better for GPU mining and GPU miners.
The wider memory operations in the BeamHash III design will lead to better use of the fuller capacity of a GPU card. This is because it reduces the potential advantage of other devices, thereby making it easier to saturate the given bandwidth of the GPU card.
All these are put in place to ensure that the network supports 100% GPU mining. It also ensures that any “FPGA would be much similar sol/watt as the fastest of GPU mining cards”.
Therefore, miners need to update their wallets and mining software before the hard fork reaches its height. So once the height is reached, they would just be able to switch over and enjoy great hashing experience.
Last year, Binance had announced the listing of the privacy coin, BEAM. In other forking news, earlier this year, Ethereum Classic announced the completion of its hard fork, Agharta. However, the biggest news in this space has certainly been Hive fork from Steem that took place last month.