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Today marks the debut of a new cryptocurrency, called Beam, one of the two highly anticipated privacy currencies implemented with the so-called "mimblewimble" protocol.
The mimblewimble protocol, which is touted as a way to make confidential and practically untraceable transactions, appeared for the first time in summer 2016 and has been widely expected since then.
While another cryptocurrency, called Grin, was initially theorized for the protocol at the end of 2016, Beam, which was conceived only in March 2018, launched before Grin, today at 1:40 UTC. Yet Grin's developers have said they will release their currency in the next two weeks on January 15th.
Beam, like Grin, promotes a new, improved privacy alternative to the original bitcoin blockchain, and as such gets support from several bitcoin developers like Jameson Lopp, who tweeted in September on these two projects and their forthcoming release.
He tweeted:
While the two technologies are relatively similar, Beam is managed by a startup with the intention of delivering operations to a dedicated non-profit foundation, while the development of Grin has been entirely financed by the community through donations.
As explained on the official Beam GitHub, users will be able to decide for themselves "what information will be available and to which parts, having complete control over their personal data in accordance with their will and applicable laws."
In short, this means that Beam has the optional feature of transparency, which could be beneficial for companies that want to use money, but must have an idea of who they are dealing with.
In addition, Beam is also based on an additional technological element known as Dandelion, released a year after the infamous mimablewimble white paper. Dandelion aims to obscure the activity of network traffic, randomizing the paths through which transactions are dispersed over a decentralized network.
After the launch of Beam, 20 percent of the total prize money will be sent to a treasury consisting of founders, investors and the Beam Foundation. Similar to the privacy-oriented zcash cryptocurrency, this blocking premium will be phased out after a period of five years.
Neither of the two cryptocurrencies created on mimblewimble has any intention of containing an initial offer of coins (ICO) – a sale of coins to finance development work before an official launch – and in the case of Beam, the development team encourages users to directly extract the newly published platform to start earning coins.
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