Beam (BEAM)

Privacy crypto that came out of the Mimblewimble community. Is simmilar to Grin, which is launched around the same time.

Beam

Type	Privacy coin
Total supply	262,800,000 Beams

Basics

• Founded in:
• Mainnet release:
• Based in: Israel
• From this CoinDesk article (21-12-2018):

"An atmosphere of friendly competition between the two has taken shape since Beam’s announcement – though it’s occasionally tipped into outright resentment from each side. Nowadays, though, Beam’s code is public, and the two projects are feeding back on each other as well. For example, Beam even partially funded Grin’s security audit.

Whereas Grin followed a highly principled, cypherpunk ideology – including no token premine or ICO, as well as volunteer-based development – Beam sought VC funding and hired a team of developers to work on the software full-time, allowing it to speed ahead of Grin in its implementation."

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Governance

• From their FAQ (21-7-2020):

"The Core Team and Beam Development Ltd. do not have any intentions to govern Beam in the long run. There is no point to having a cryptocurrency governed in a centralized way by a corporation. Therefore, we offer our solution to our community. We are opening the code, welcoming Open Source Developers and setting up a non-profit foundation that will be unconditionally funded by the Treasury.

We believe a startup environment is best for innovation, that's why we are raising money. Treasury model is the best way to repay our investors and to provide a reward to the founding team. Treasury works in the following way: in the first five years of Beam existence, 20% of all emitted coins automatically go to the Treasury. Technically, the additional coins are emitted for each mined block. Our investors, the core team, our advisors and the non-profit Beam Foundation will be getting Beam coins from the Treasury on a monthly basis. We believe that the five year payout period creates an alignment of interest between all the parties and ensures that our coin will get the support it requires to succeed."

Token

Launch

• From this article by Bitcoinmagazine (1-8-2018):

More comparable to Zcash, Beam will be launched and maintained by a for-profit company with the same name (currently headed by Israeli entrepreneur Alexander Zaidelson), though this maintaining role should later transition to a non-profit foundation. Beam will also have a founders’ reward: the Beam company and foundation will receive 20 percent of all newly mined coins for the first five years. It’s not yet announced what Beam’s emission schedule will look like, but (unlike Grin and like Bitcoin) it will be capped. Beam is also being tested right now and is scheduled to launch in December 2018."

Tech

• Whitepaper can be found here (10-2-2020).
• Code can be viewed here.
• Built on: Mimblewimble tech
• Programming language used: From this article by Bitcoinmagazine (1-8-2018): "Beam is being implemented in coding language C++ (like Bitcoin Core).

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS), from their FAQ (21-7-2020):

"17 transactions per second. While this number is higher than Bitcoin and other existing privacy coins, it is important to emphasize that it is not high enough to use Beam as a means of exchange. In the future, it will be possible to improve transaction throughput by using a second layer out-of-chain solution such as Lightning, Thunderella or similar. Then you should be able to pay for your lattes with beams. Until then, Beam’s primary use case is store of value rather than day-to-day payments."

• Latency:
• In Beam, one block will be created approximately every minute. Each block will contain around 1,000 transactions.

How it works

• From this CoinDesk article (3-1-2019):

"As explained on Beam’s official GitHub, users will be able to decide for themselves “which information will be available and to which parties, having complete control over his personal data in accordance to his will and applicable laws.”

In short, this means that Beam has the optional feature of transparency, which could be beneficial to businesses that want to use the coin but need to have some insight into who they’re transacting with.

In addition, Beam also builds upon an additional piece of technology known as Dandelion that was released a year after the infamous mimblewimble white paper. Dandelion focuses on obscuring network traffic activity by randomizing the pathways through which transactions get dispersed on a decentralized network."

Smart Contracts

• From their blog (23-7-2020):

"How would it be possible to build such applications on Beam which does not have Smart Contracts and is UTXO based?

By now we thought we would get used to the magical properties of the Mimblewimble. We already saw it with Cut Through, Atomic Swaps, Laser Beam and Lelantus and this time it will allow us to build ‘Scriptless Contracts’ that would both allow transition between UTXO and Account model, and implement complex business logic. The secret, as usual, lies in the implementation of the transaction kernels, key enablers of the Mimblewimble extensibility. Just as in Lelantus, the kernels enable the transformation of UTXOs into system state and vice versa thus allowing contracts to operate.

The other part of the application logic takes place off-chain and is performed via exchange of SBBS messages between the wallets and creation of new types of transactions. The basic idea is that while the trade itself is formed off-chain in the form of a multisig agreement, the settlement and verification are done on-chain, thus making sure the eventual state of the system is always consistent.

The resulting architecture thus utilizes all of the Beam infrastructure including Atomic Swaps for locking non-Beam collateral, Laser Beam channels for instant payments where required, SBBS for all off-chain negotiations and ‘Scriptless Contracts’ to handle the application logic."

Upgrades

• From their blog (14-6-2022):

1. "Activate support for IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) for storing large amounts of data to reduce blockchain bloat making Beam more efficient.
2. Activate support for High-Frequency Transactions (HFTX) allowing Beam Wallet to communicate with nodes’ API reducing the likelihood of frontrunning and sandwich attacks.
3. Activate support for Decentralized DApp Store making DApps more censorship-resistant and allowing Beamers to install DApps locally on their Beam Wallet.
4. The amount of $BEAM required to mint new a confidential asset will be adjusted to 10 $BEAM in accordance with the wishes of the community. The outcome of the vote shall become binding following the hard fork."

Interoperability

• From their blog (6-2-2020):

"Bridges to Ethereum will allow creating Beam representation of certain ERC20 tokens and creating 1-to-1 pegs of such ERC20 tokens to their representation on Beam blockchain. For example, users will be able to lock a certain amount of Dai in the Bridge’s smart contract, and get the exact same amount of bDai on the Beam Blockchain. The bDai tokens can be freely transacted between Beam wallets, and can also be transferred back to Dai at any moment. Multiple types of tokens will be supported, and more tokens can be added in the future by Bridge operators. In the more distant future, we may consider developing bridges to other blockchains besides Ethereum."

Other Details

ASIC Resistance

• Beam has launched with a slightly modified version of Equihash that only general purpose hardware (GPUs) should be able to mine. However, it only intends to keep the ASICs at bay for a 12 month period, giving the GPU miners a “head start,” one of the ambassadors said.
• Had a hard fork in July 2019. At block height 321,321 the mining algorithm was changed from Beam Hash I to Beam Hash II. "The rationale is to signal to ASIC developers that there is no point to start developing ASICs until the second hard fork is out. We timed the first fork roughly 6 months from launch, and the second one is expected at the beginning of 2020. The 6-month timeframe is chosen because that’s how long it usually takes to develop a new ASIC chip."

Privacy Method

• Mimblewimble consensus

Compliance

• From their FAQ (21-7-2020):

"Auditability feature is an extension that we added to original Mimblewimble protocol, allowing businesses or private individuals to report their financial history to their auditors or any other party of their choosing in a secure and provable way. If the user chooses to use Auditability (btw, we may change this unwieldy name in the future), her wallet generates several key pairs for audit. Alternatively, a public key can be provided by an auditor (think of EY, Deloitte, KPMG or PWC) and added to the wallet by the user. Transaction details are encrypted with that key and attached to the original transaction (that remains private), along with a proof that those details match. The user can also include additional information (e.g. digital documents, signatures, etc.) in the metadata of each transaction by storing the hash of such documents in the blockchain. With Auditability, each transaction is tagged, such that only an Auditor may identify it in the blockchain using the public key. The auditor is not, however, able to create such a transaction, nor spend any money. The auditor can retrieve all the tagged transactions form the blockchain, make sure that the transactions comply with the presented documents. Auditability is strictly an opt-in feature. If the user hasn’t chosen to be auditable, there is no way anyone can retrieve any information about his transactions from the blockchain."

Their Other Projects

DeFi

• Wants to get into (23-7-2020) assets, oracles, contracts, etc.

• From Decrypt (23-6-2020):

"The new update, named Eager Electron 5.0, will add confidential assets to the Beam network. Confidential assets are a type of token that can be created on Beam, and can be used to represent practically anything, including other cryptocurrencies. They have the same levels of privacy and can be traded on Beam’s decentralized exchange (DEX).

To create a type of confidential asset, the user has to lock up 3,000 Beams, worth $1,440 at current prices. They are then able to issue as many tokens of this type as they would like. The money is held as collateral and gets returned when all the confidential assets are brought back in and destroyed. Corem described this as an anti-spam feature. The update will also lay the infrastructure for scriptless contracts. These are like smart contracts but where the details of the contract are kept private, as well as the transactions themselves. For example, if a smart contract was a business transaction, it would expose the details of that transaction, not something that businesses would want.

Roadmap

• Can be found here (Q1 2020).

• Beam cited its plans to integrate with BOLT, the privacy-centric lightning implementation (In a later team update it was called: Lightning Network POC (Laser Beam) and was demonstrated in 9-2019), as well as adding atomic swaps and other features.

Lelantus Implementation

• From this blog post (26-9-2019):

"The technology caught our attention in July 2019, and Vlad Gelfer, our core dev, started studying it and finding ways to adapt it to Mimblewimble. The result of this work is a special Mimblewimble-adapted flavor of Lelantus that we called simply Lelantus-MW. For more details on the protocol and how it is different from the original Lelantus, read our Wiki article here. The PoC implementation of Lelantus-MW can be found here, it is still work-in-progress.

We would like to thank Aram, Reuben and the Zcoin team for the friendly cooperation, and we hope to continue working together to make Lelantus better for everyone. 

We will go on working on Lelantus-MW and plan to fully implement it on Testnet before the end of 2019 and release Lelantus-MW on mainnet in early 2020"

 Later saying: 

"As we started working on Lelantus, it became clear that it greatly improved privacy."

 Which hits to some possible short comings in the Mimblewimble protocol. 

Upcoming releases

• From this roadmap blog post (26-9-2019)

"The Double Doppler release will include the following major features:

• A decentralized marketplace for Atomic Swaps in the Beam wallet
• Lelantus-MW on Testnet
• Confidential Assets POC/Testnet
• Multisig
• Hardware Wallets — Finalizing Trezor working on Ledger support
• Opt-in Audit — initial features

The next version, codenamed Eager Electron, will be released in the first quarter of 2020 and will contain the following items:

• Second Hard Fork (PoW update)
• Lelantus-MW on Mainnet
• Confidential Assets on Mainnet
• Tor/i2P integration

Some of the functionality that we originally planned for 2019 but was given lower priority compared to other tasks:

• GhostDAG research and POC — delayed to 2020
• Porting to Rust — we will seek the community help for this. Beam Foundation will issue grants to perform this task.
• Enhanced Wallet Security — delayed till we start working on Beam Business Wallet
• Lightning — while Lightning is a fascinating technology, we feel that Beam network is fast and private enough at the moment, so the work on full Lighting implementation is also delayed
• BLS Signatures — currently delayed, we will review this in the beginning of 2020

Our 2019 goal is to build a solid Layer 1 network for Beam. In 2020, we will spend more time on expanding Layer 2 and making Beam more of a platform.

Confidential Assets being the first step in this direction, the natural next steps is to offer full Smart Contract capabilities to our network.

Smart Contracts will allow for a multitude of applications, including stable coins, P2P lending, non-custodial exchanges, and other DeFi applications.

Mimblewimble does not support smart contracts per se, so the right way to add them to Beam is through a sidechain. We will be researching the existing projects to choose the right technology for the sidechain (can be Libra, Ton or something else). Our high-level design goals are to create a sidechain with Turing-complete smart contracts, multiple assets with the ability for 1-to-1 pegging to assets on Beam mainnet, fast execution and strong privacy."

• From their blog (6-2-2020):

"DeFi Building Blocks. Based on Scriptless scripts technology, we will develop primitives to enable certain kinds of DeFi applications on Beam — think of Collateralized Debt Positions (CDP), lending, STO and more.

Following the development of the Bridges, it will be possible to create Sidechains that will support complementary advanced technologies such as smart contracts with EOS, Ethereum, etc."

Competition

• Grin, Zcash, Monero and now also Ethereum because Beam wants to go into smart contracts.
• Comparison between Beam, Zcash and Monero can be found here (16-10-2020).
• Comparison between Beam and Grin can be found here (21-7-2020).

Team, Funding, Partners

Team

• Full team can be found here (21-7-2020).
• Headed by Israeli entrepreneur Alexander Zaidelson (CEO)
• Alex Romanov; CTO
• Amir Aaronson; COO
• Wilke Trei (aka Lolliedieb); PoW Advisor who developed Beam Hash I and Beam Hash II 
• Vlad Gelfer, core dev
• Guy Corem; dev
• Has a large amount of 'Ambassadors' and advisers.

Funding

• Has investments of a bunch of companies, some of which are: Youbi Capital, Alternity and Ceyuan Ventures, 1kx,