Beam Biweekly—May 2025 Ed. #2

Covers all the developments in the Beam ecosystem from May 15th - 31st 2025.

Danai Raza

and

Maxnflaxl.beam

Jun 01, 2025

Greetings Beamers!

In the last newsletter, we were proud to report successful testing of the upcoming Beam Layer-2 “Beam Warp”.

(Layer-2 refers to off-chain or secondary frameworks built on top of a Layer-1 blockchain to improve scalability, speed, and/or reduce transaction fees.)

Along our journey to bring Beam Warp live, we continue to fix bugs, add optimisations, and experiment dynamically with new features to the pBTF consensus algorithm.

(Consensus in blockchain technology refers to a mechanism that ensures all nodes agree on the same block, verifies the integrity of transactions, and protects against malicious attacks. It is essential for adding new blocks to the chain and is closely related to the mining process.)

Development Updates

Beam Warp

New "cannibalization" feature for the PBFT consensus
Redeployed dappnet2 with cannibalisation — test successful
Fixed stamp/sync logic for PBFT
Optimisations to FlyClient for sync and micro-reorgs in PBFT mode
Added Network Selector for the Experimental Explorer
Deployed and successfully tested the L1 <> L2 bridge
Other miscellaneous bug fixes

Tests for Beam Warp are underway on testnet, starting with four validators and a test parameter of a “3-second block-time”.

The mainnet launch for Beam Warp is expected to have a ~1-second block-time.

What is the cannibalization feature?

Cannibalization, also known as, micro-reorg, is a savvy new feature specific to Beam’s implementation of the PBFT consensus algorithm for our upcoming Layer-2 “Beam Warp”.

In PBFT blocks are created rapidly, even when there are no transactions being processed. Which means that a lot of empty blocks are created, and the blockchain size grows rapidly.

So, the idea is to reduce the number of blocks. We achieve this by delaying block generation until there are transactions.

This prevents unnecessary blockchain growth and keeps the short transactions confirmation times.

Closing Thoughts: We’re extremely excited about Beam Warp, and we believe it’ll be a breakthrough for privacy-preserving DeFi. We’ll continue to document and share all the developments about Beam Warp in the future.