Introducing Beam!
Tags: Finance, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin

This story has been published in 2018 and updated in May 2019.

Why today?

We couldn’t think of a better day to introduce our project and what we have been up to. Thursday July 19th marks the day that an anonymous developer by the handle of “Tom Elvis Jedusor” first proposed the possibility of an elegant cryptographic protocol that addressed once for both scalability and anonymity — Mimblewimble. It is only through this anonymous developer’s foundational efforts that we are able to carry the ball forward with our own implementation of Mimblewimble. Therefore we are happy to present BEAM, a novel implementation of Mimblewimble this Thursday, July 19th, 2018 — or as we like to call it, International Tom Elvis Jedusor Day.

The need for privacy

Back in 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin and gave the world a great hope of an independent, non-inflationary and decentralized currency. Today, Bitcoin is still by far the leading digital currency out there. However, with time it became clear that Bitcoin’s anonymity is an illusion — all the transactions are part of the public ledger, and with today’s big data tech it is possible to trace what is going on. Nobody wants their bank account balance and transaction history to be available for everyone to see, so there emerged the need for private currencies.

Several great privacy coin projects have been developed, but they are either too computationally heavy or not truly decentralized or both. We strongly believe that financial privacy is a basic human right, and we felt that something must be done to fulfill that right. That’s why Beam was born.

What is Beam?

Beam is privacy-centric cryptocurrency based on the Mimblewimble Protocol. Beam transactions are private by default, and storing the entire transaction history is not necessary for blockchain validation. This ultimately reduces the blockchain size and improves scalability. Beam supports many transaction types such as escrow transactions, time-locked transactions and atomic swaps. Our roadmap includes dozens of features and is constantly evolving. We are striving to make Beam an ultimate Store-of-Value coin.

The team

Beam has put together a remarkable team of first-class engineers and entrepreneurs, and a strong advisory board comprised of accomplished cryptocurrency veterans. We have 10 full-time developers, a growing marketing team, and seasoned management. The technical team is led by Alex Romanov. Beam’s community is built around crypto fans, privacy advocates, entrepreneurs, investors and miners. We are actively going on building a global community who share our mission of creating a private digital currency and will maintain and improve Beam.

The technology

Beam is based on Mimblewimble — an elegant protocol released by an anonymous developer in 2016. Named after a tongue-tying spell from the Harry Potter saga, Mimblewimble uses Pedersen Commitment scheme for full anonymity and zero-knowledge range proofs to ensure the validity of transaction amounts.

To enhance privacy and reduce the blockchain size, Mimblewimble merges all intermediate outputs within a single block and across multiple blocks, thus only storing the current UTXO state and making the blockchain size an order of magnitude smaller than in other leading currencies.

Beam implemented Mimblewimble from scratch using C++.

Beam blocks are mined using memory-hard Equihash Proof-of-Work algorithm. The block time is 1 minute on average.

Who maintains Beam?

Beam is maintained by a non-profit Foundation. There is no ICO nor premine. Both the Core Team and the Foundation are funded through a block reward mechanism, with a certain percentage of coins being emitted from every newly mined block.

How to use Beam?

You can discover Beam’s user-friendly technology and products (Wallet) on the following platforms: