Beam cryptocurrency is a new generation project aimed at providing the community with financial freedom by creating a completely confidential value exchange system based on the MimbleWimble protocol.
Beam history creation
The history of the Beam project begins with MimbleWimble, a cryptography-based elliptic curve protocol whose WhitePaper was proposed in 2016 by an anonymous developer.
Interestingly, both the name of the technology itself and the pseudonym of its creator (Tom Elvis Jedusor) are borrowed from J.K. Rowling’s book series about the young wizard Harry Potter.
In her books, MimbleWimble is a spell that made a person tongue-tied, i.e. made it impossible to speak clearly. With blockchains that work on the protocol of the same name, about the same thing happens – they cannot disclose information about the actions of their users.
Initially, MimbleWimble was supposed to be the solution to the Bitcoin scalability problem. However, due to the complexity of the implementation of this venture, the developers decided on the advisability of creating separate crypto projects based on this anonymous protocol.
Work on one of the MimbleWimble implementations has been carried out since March 2018 by the Israel-based company Beam Development Limited.
The launch of the main network of the Beam cryptocurrency took place 10 months after the start of development – on January 3, 2019, on the day of the 10th anniversary of the Bitcoin genesis block. Thus, this project became the first working implementation of the MimbleWimble protocol. The second was the Grin cryptocurrency, the creation of which began a year earlier than Beam, but in the end, it was launched 12 days later than its competitor.
The Beam project is organized in the form of a classic non-ICO startup, which initially received funds from investors as part of a closed round.
The current financial model of the Beam cryptocurrency is based on the functioning of the Treasury. Within the first 5 years after the launch of the network, it will be replenished by deducting 20% of all coins mined by miners. This savings pays a monthly salary to the core team, and remuneration to consultants, investors, and the non-profit Beam Foundation, to which they plan to transfer project management in the future.
The chosen funding model should create a balance of interests between all participants in the Beam ecosystem and guarantee its development in the long term.
Coin characteristics
The beam coin is source code written in C ++. Equihash mining algorithm. The network has an official blockchain explorer, but by and large, viewing it is useless for an outside observer. There is no data on senders and recipients. Only the time of the creation of the next block is recorded. The Dandelion network mechanism protects deanonymization. Verification of transactions does not require large computing power since all intermediate information is removed from the chain. Only unspent output is captured so that the block size can be reduced. According to preliminary estimates, the Beam network will weigh three times less (75 GB versus 300 for Bitcoin).
Blockchain engineers at Beam Development Limited are planning to implement additional solutions to further slow down the growth rate of the blockchain. The mechanism of operation of the Beam crypto network can be briefly described as follows:
- Each transfer is generated in a secure channel using the Schnorr protocol and signed by both participants;
- The completed transaction is processed by the full node. It contains data on the non-interactive proof of the zero limits. It makes it possible to verify the sum of the outputs. Information about the crypto network is stored in the Merkle tree. The root hash of it is in the header of the signed block. To ensure fast synchronization of new nodes, each node periodically creates a compressed archive with the blockchain history;
- Miners include the transaction in a block and send it to peers for validation.
The Auditability function is integrated into the Beam cryptocurrency network, which allows you to create auditor keys. Thus, outside observers can view the history of operations.
Benefits of Beam cryptocurrency
This cryptocurrency has the following advantages:
- high confidentiality;
- flexibility and a large number of possible applications;
- the ability to use audit tools in the wallet configuration to comply with official regulations;
- high scalability and energy efficiency;
- reliability and confidence in the further development of the project due to the deduction of 20% of the remuneration for the blocks found in the Treasury (the fund for the development and promotion of the Beam project);
- ease of use of Beam as a cryptocurrency asset;
- compatibility with widespread equipment for mining on video cards with the Equihash 150.5 algorithm, which provides a high degree of network decentralization.
Disadvantages of the crypto coin Beam
The serious disadvantage of Beam is it’s not a very fast network. The existing hash power is enough to confirm only 17 transactions per second (several times faster than Bitcoin, but three times worse than Litecoin cryptocurrency).
In addition, there are questions about the stability and security of the Beam network. The project’s blockchain has already been suspended once due to an unnamed issue that was fixed within a few hours. Also, a few months ago, a serious vulnerability was discovered in the Beam wallet software that could put users’ assets at risk, but luckily it was fixed in time. There is no guarantee that this will not happen again in the future.
