What is Beam?

In March 2018 a team assembled by Israeli programmer and entrepreneur Alexander Zaidelson under the aegis of Beam Development Limited began work on the Beam project. Most of the company’s staff are from post-Soviet countries.

Ten months after the start—on January 3, 2019, the tenth anniversary of Bitcoin’s genesis block—the Beam mainnet was launched.

Beam became the first implementation of the MimbleWimble protocol. Twelve days later the second working implementation—Grin—went live, although its development had started a year earlier.

• The project is implemented in C++.
• The algorithm used is Equihash.
• Beam has no addresses: using private keys, users control their coins, represented as UTXOs (unspent transaction outputs).
• Transactions in Beam are private by default: data on senders and recipients are not stored. Privacy is provided by the Dandelion network mechanism.

The MimbleWimble protocol improves the scalability of Beam’s blockchain by substantially reducing its size: all intermediate UTXO states are pruned, leaving only unspent outputs.

Thanks to smaller blocks, by the time the Beam network reaches the scale of Bitcoin, its size will be roughly 70GB—30% of Bitcoin’s current blockchain size (260GB). The Beam developers intend to introduce additional scaling solutions that will cut the network’s size by at least a factor of three.

Using a secure channel (offline or online), participants create a new transaction, which both wallets sign using the Schnorr protocol.

The wallet sends to a node a transaction with its inputs and outputs represented as Pedersen commitments, along with data on fees and transferred amounts. Each transaction also contains a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof attesting that the sum of its outputs is positive.

The node verifies the transaction against a recent state of the blockchain stored as a Merkle tree. The root hash of the tree is written into the block header during Proof-of-Work (PoW). Each node regularly creates a compacted history, ensuring synchronisation of new and existing nodes.

A mining pool adds the transaction to one of the blocks mined every minute and sends it back to the node for propagation and verification.

Newly mined blocks with transactions are sent to peers. A valid block that extends the longest chain is accepted as the main one and propagated further until full consensus is reached.

When connecting to the network for the first time, a new node can request a compacted history containing only the system state and block headers, so there is no need to fetch the full transaction history each time.

• Escrow transactions.
• Timelocked transactions.
• Atomic swaps with bitcoin, Litecoin and Qtum.
• Auditable transactions (this option allows the creation of auditor keys that tax authorities, accountants and others can use to view transactions on the blockchain).
• Offline transactions.

Thanks to an extension of the MimbleWimble protocol, additional tokens—confidential assets—can be issued on the Beam blockchain. They allow transaction participants to cryptographically verify their security.

• BEAM mining currently uses a modified version of the Equihash PoW algorithm.
• Beam mining is available on Windows, Linux or Mac computers with GPUs with at least 4GB of memory (AMD RX560+/Nvidia GTX 1050+).
• Mining software can be downloaded from the project’s official website. GMiner and Bminer with Equihash support are also available.
• BEAM can be mined using an OpenCL/CUDA miner (GPU) and via the desktop wallet’s built-in toolkit (GPU/CPU).
• New blocks on the Beam network are created every 60 seconds. Each block generates 100 coins: 80 go to miners, 20 remain in the project’s Treasury.
• Each day, 144,000 tokens enter circulation.
• A total of 262,800,000 BEAM tokens will be issued; the approximate number in circulation is 48,195,200 (as of December 2019).
• In 2019 the block reward is 80 coins. In 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 it will be 40 coins. From 2024 to 2027 it will be 25 coins. Thereafter, halving will occur every four years; in the 133rd year of the coin’s existence, issuance will cease.
• Allocations to the fund and the developer team: in 2019—20 coins from the block reward; from 2020 to 2024—10 coins.

On January 9, 2019 a critical vulnerability in the Beam wallet software was identified and fixed the same day.

On January 21, 2019 the Beam blockchain was paused for two hours due to a problem at block #25709.

At present the Beam blockchain processes 17 transactions per second, outpacing Bitcoin and many privacy-focused cryptocurrencies on this metric. The Beam team acknowledges that current throughput does not make the cryptocurrency a full-fledged means of payment and promises to increase speed through second-layer scaling solutions—Lightning, Thunderella and others. For now, Beam’s use case is largely as a store of value.

In August 2019 the developers carried out the Clear Cathode hard fork: changes were made to the mining PoW algorithm, and support for one-sided payments and multisignatures was added.

On December 3, 2019 the Double Doppler 4.0 Beam wallet was released for Windows, macOS and Linux. The wallet, currently in beta, allows atomic transactions with minimal fees.

For the first quarter of 2020 a hard fork—Eager Electron is planned—which will change the mining algorithm, add support for I2P and Tor, and integrate the Lelantus protocol for private financial transactions.

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