Beam set to execute a second major hard fork

The Beam blockchain mainnet was launched on January 3rd, 2019 to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the Bitcoin genesis block. BEAM currently has a listed market cap of US$ 32,166,801. The asset currently trades for ~US$0.50, having gained ~34.5% in the last month. The most popular trading pairs for BEAM are BEAM/BTC and BEAM/USDT. It can be bought and sold on exchanges like Binance and Gate.io.

BEAM is a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency, like Monero (XMR) or Zcash (ZEC), and is based on a privacy protocol known as MimbleWimble (MW). MimbleWimble is a reference to a tongue-tying spell from the Harry Potter book series and its whitepaper was written by the anonymous Tom Elvis Jedusor.

The MW protocol uses the original bitcoin architecture and cuts away parts of the chain, like Scripts, in accordance with principles from CoinJoin. Coinjoin provides a trustless method for combining multiple bitcoin payments from multiple spenders making it difficult to determine what spender is sending to which recipients. This style of transacting was originally proposed by Greg Maxwell in 2013.

MW is designed to be scalable and private. It has been noted that some blockchain privacy features like the ring signatures used by Monero and zero-knowledge proofs used by Zcash add extra cryptographic features to their blockchain networks which makes scaling more challenging.

Beam also lets its users choose their level of privacy. The Beam whitepaper details a solution that keeps as little information as possible about transactions in the public record, in an attempt to prevent future analysis and reduce the chance of disclosing personally identifiable information.

Beam successfully completed its first hard fork on August 19, 2019. This fork changed the mining algorithm from Beam Hash I to Beam Hash II and occurred at block 321,321. The upgrade also included a new fee system and support for relative time locks.

The Beam blockchain will execute its second major hard fork at block height 777777, which is expected to be on June 28th. The hard fork, discussed previously on the Q1 roadmap, will include an upgrade to the Proof-of-work algorithm, from BeamHash II to BeamHash III. More details released about the new BeamHash III hashing algorithm around the time of the hard fork.

The fork will also activate support for Lelantus MimbleWimble, activate support for one sided payments, and activate support for Confidential Asset issuance. Confidential assets allow the creation of an arbitrary number of new asset types on the same blockchain.

The confidential asset system generates a public and private key pair for new asset types, with each public key acting as an asset tag. The issuer of each specific asset manages the private key and has access to specific metadata about the asset, such as its total supply, and controls its emission and burning schedule.

The Beam team has also stated users will be able to enforce additional rules for different types of tokens, which will allow the creation of smart assets and enable a wide variety of applications for Beam including confidential Decentralized Finance (DeFi) models. The amount of BEAM required to create a confidential asset will be set at 3000 BEAM.

The Lelantus Protocol implementation that will be used by the Beam blockchain is based on the publicly available work of Zcoin’s cryptographer Aram Jivanyan. The Beam version of Lelantus is designed to solve a MimbleWimble linkability problem.

In its original form MW transactions are published to an unconfirmed transaction pool. Transaction inputs and outputs are still visible when unconfirmed. Miners are required to create transaction blocks in a way that allows transactions to hide some of this information. The confirmed block will have a smaller number of inputs and outputs mixed together in a way that makes it more difficult to recognize all the details of a specific transaction. it is possible, however, for anyone to keep recording all the transactions from the unconfirmed transaction pool.

Unlike Coinjoin, which MW is based on, the Lelantus scientific paper suggests it enables direct anonymous payments where users can pay each other by hiding their transaction origins and amounts. There are some differences from the original Zcoin Lelantus implementation such as support for confidential assets and hidden transaction values.

Lelantus is also the basis of the one sided payments system that will be implemented in the upcoming hard fork. This will make payments on Beam distinguishable to the payee only, but not to others. After Block Height 777777 is reached, Beam users will have to upgrade to version 5.0 BEAM wallets.