Israeli crypto startup Beam announced that it is going to undergo a hard fork on its network next month to add new features.

Per Tuesday’s announcement, the chain split will be done on block height 321321, which the company estimates to achieve on August 15. This is also the first network upgrade of the blockchain project.

The FX Industry Demands the Best – London Summit 2019

“This first network upgrade will occur at Block Height 321321, expected to be reached on August 15th, 2019,” Beam noted.

Detailing the changes to the network, Beam stated that the new version would support PoW algorithm from “Beam Hash I to Beam Hash II” along with mandatory SBBS PoW. Furthermore, the upgrade will also enable relative time locks on the network.

The company will also term the upgraded nodes, wallets, and miners as Clear Cathode 3.0.

“The Node and the Desktop Wallet binaries will be released on July 17th, 2019 to allow everyone approximately 30 days to upgrade to the new version,” the announcement added.

“The binaries support the current blockchain, and will automatically switch to the new consensus mechanism when the target block height is reached. No user intervention will be required. Funds will not be affected.”

A better protocol for privacy?

Beam is one of the few cryptocurrency projects that are based on the Mimblewimble protocol, which aims to solve the privacy and scalability issues of Bitcoin.

Unlike most cryptocurrencies, Mimblewimble-based coins do not have a wallet address. The user only holds a set of keys that control the unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs). For every transaction, the user creates two new outputs – one to send the desired amount of crypto and the other to store the balance. The key to the first address is shared with the other party involved in the transaction.

The Israel-based company launched its token earlier this year, which almost tripled its value since last month. The project also attracted the attention of investors and raised an undisclosed amount from Japanese recruiting platform giant Recruit even before its mainnet launch.