Israel-based startup Beam is set to be the first cryptocurrency on the Mimblewimble protocol as it confirmed that the coin will be launched on January 3, 2019, according to Distributed.com.
Beam is being developed as a privacy coin. However, unlike other coins of this genre, it will be highly customizable. The users of this coin will have the control to set the required privacy level, so if someone wants transactions to be tracked for any purpose like taxation, Beam will allow that.
Beam’s CEO, Alexander Zaidelson, in an interview to Distributed.com, said: “We felt we could build a platform that has confidentiality and scalability at its core and allows for tons of powerful and usable features to be built on top of it, giving it a great chance for wide adoption and for eventually realizing the original crypto dream of making financials truly decentralized and permissionless.”
What is Mimblewimble?
Aimed to solve the privacy and scalability issues of Bitcoin, Mimblewimble was proposed in 2016 by an anonymous cryptographer under the pseudonym Tom Elvis Jedusor - inspired by the Harry Potter villain Lord Voldemort. Unlike most Cryptocurrencies , Mimblewimble-based coins do not have any 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 desirable 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.
Mimblewimble is much more a scaling tech than a privacy tech. It's incredibly naive to believe that no one will run an archival node that keeps a full record of the Blockchain . Grin's privacy as such comes from CT and the inability of users to re-use addresses.
— Eric/ (@wheatpond) December 20, 2018
“We were fascinated by the elegance of the Mimblewimble protocol and understood that this is something that Bitcoin should have been. Lack of transaction confidentiality and poor scalability are some of the major issues that hinder crypto adoption,” Zaidelson said.
Beam is the second blockchain-based project announced on Mimblewimble, the first one being Grin. However, due to many complications, both projects were delayed, and Grin is now scheduled to be launched on January 15, making Beam the first crypto on Mimblewimble.
Bonus Projects
Beams CEO further revealed that the team is working on two more side projects - Project Lumini and Beam Lightning. The first one aims ito connect the blockchain of Beam and Ethereum while the second one will integrate lightning network on Beam’s blockchain.
“Contrary to many other cryptocurrencies, Beam blockchain does not hold all the transaction history,” Zaidelson explained. “Instead, it only holds all the UTXOs and a small piece of information called ‘transaction kernel’ for each transaction. Using the kernels, it can be proven that the current state of UTXOs is valid and that everyone’s [cryptocurrency] originates from a valid transaction.”
