Beam (BEAM) Calculator

Beam, launched in 2019, implements the MimbleWimble protocol to deliver default confidentiality, concealing sender, receiver, and amount through Pedersen commitments, compact range proofs such as Bulletproofs, and transaction kernels that permit supply auditability without exposing individual balances; in effect, privacy operates as an immune system for financial data, containing leakage at the source while permitting essential vital signs to be checked. The chain’s cut-through mechanism structurally reduces bloat by eliminating spent outputs and aggregating intermediate hops, improving scalability and verification efficiency, while Dandelion++ obfuscates network-layer origins by splitting propagation into stem and fluff phases to mitigate deanonymization. Consensus relies on the BeamHashIII proof-of-work algorithm, engineered to be memory-intensive and GPU-friendly to broaden miner participation and resist rapid ASIC consolidation, with one-minute block intervals balancing confirmation latency and network load; combined with a deflationary emission model featuring four-year halvings and a capped supply of 262,800,000 units, and with no pre-mine or initial coin offering, the system aligns incentives with open participation. Privacy is further reinforced by integration of the Lelantus family of techniques that enable minting and burning of anonymous coins to enlarge the anonymity set and sever deterministic links in transaction histories, strengthening fungibility beyond conventional mixing. Operational functionality includes mandatory confidentiality with opt-in controls for audit and compliance via payment proofs and selective disclosure keys, as well as atomic swaps with external chains via hash time-locked contracts, time-locked transactions, and escrow features that allow practical settlement workflows without revealing sensitive data. Building atop the base protocol, Beam supports Confidential Assets that permit issuance and transfer of private tokens without complex smart contracts, a decentralized exchange for confidential trading of native and asset tokens, and the Beam Virtual Machine using WebAssembly to run privacy-preserving decentralized applications and DeFi logic with deterministic execution under confidentiality constraints. Collectively, these components reflect a documented design choice: maintain verifiable supply integrity and operational transparency where necessary for adoption, yet default to strong, protocol-level privacy that treats metadata exposure as a systemic pathology to be prevented rather than cured after the fact.