Since Bitcoin, the first implementation of the idea of peer to peer electronic cash system proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto back in 2008 , the field of crypto currencies and blockchain based systems has exploded producing thousands of different projects, technologies and research papers. Today one can find such projects ranging from distributed computing to Enterprise solutions and applied to all fields from medicine to automotive industries.
However, the basic need for people to store their money and transact in a secure way without relying on a centralized authority is still the main use case and the most important, which is one of the reasons why Bitcoin is still the top cryptocurrency and is as influential today as it was almost ten years ago.

What is BEAM

BEAM a truly decentralized and a next generation confidential cryptocurrency next which works based on a forward looking MimbleWimble protocol with very strong privacy, scalability and fungibility. The transactions of BEAM are not accessible to the public by default, and it is not necessary to store all transaction history for the validation of blockchain, thereby causing reduction and improvement in the size of blockchain and scalability respectively.
The types of transaction that BEAM will support includes but not limited to: time-locked transactions, escrow transactions and atomic swaps.

Benefits of Beam

Users have complete control over privacy - user decides which information will beavailable and to which parties, having complete control over his personal data in accordance to his will and applicable laws.
Confidentiality without penalty - in BEAM confidential transactions do not cause bloatingof the blockchain, avoiding excessive computational overhead or penalty on
performance or scalability while completely concealing the transaction value.
No trusted setup required.
Blocks are mined using Equihash Proof-of-Work algorithm.
Limited emission using periodic halving with total amount of coins ~210 million.
No addresses stored in the blockchain - no information whatsoever about the either sender or a receiver of a transaction is stored in the blockchain.
Superior scalability through compact blockchain size - using cut-through feature of MimbleWimble BEAM blockchain is orders of magnitude smaller than any other blockchain implementation.
BEAM supports many transaction types such as escrow transactions, time locked transactions atomic swaps and more.
No premine. No ICO. Backed by a treasury, emitted from every block during the first five years.
Implemented from scratch in C++ by a team of professional developers.

How BEAM Works

The performance of Beam transactions performed per second at this time are perhaps not very measurable, but it can be said that they are a bit better than those of Bitcoin. BEAM is being used as a method for the storage of value and as the cryptocurrency grows, performance will improve.

Mimblewimble

Mimblewimble is a protocol published by an anonymous author; much like the famous Satoshi Nakamoto; creator of Bitcoin.

Mimblewimble focuses on
(a) Confidential Transactions and
(b) Transaction Cut – Through.

(a) Confidential Transactions

It use cryptographic commitment scheme with two basic properties: hiding and binding.
It is similar to giving someone a closed safe box with some message inside that only you know the combination for. When time comes you can reveal the key and the person can make sure that your commitment is valid (blinding) while she can not know what is was before the key is received (hiding).

(b) Transaction Cut – Through

A block in a block chain is a large list of transactions and can be thought of as one large transaction to be “cut through” (combining all the transactions in between A-Z). Applying this principle even further from individual blocks to the entire blockchain creates a system that only needs the current state of transactions instead of the entire history of all transactions as they occurred (which is how Bitcoin works).
With this system, unspent transactions outputs (a transaction received by a user which has persisted in the blockchain) can be proved to belong to the receiving user via the value of the message and the value of the blinding factor. After creating the transaction, only the commitment is recorded on the blockchain; not the addresses of the users or the amounts exchanged.
Cutting down the amount of data required to store and verify transaction data allows Mimblewimble to work with smaller blocks!

Current Issues - Privacy?
Blockchains such as Bitcoin make it possible for people to track data and narrow down the source and end point of transactions. This makes it possible to eventually track back to the party involved in the transaction by analyzing the blockchain which is publicly available for all to see.
Therefore, even though a cryptocurrency may appear to be anonymous, careful analysis of how the money has travelled could reveal the user. This is a major concern for users who prioritize their security.
Blockchains themselves, even without added privacy features, are very bulky and computationally heavy. This makes them inefficient as well as prone to scalability issues as they grow to meet the global demand.