Beam is a privacy focused coin that began development in March 2018. The projects uses the Mimblewimble protocol to shield transaction data and make them untraceable. 

As is the case with other privacy tokens, BEAM features an opt-in audibility option that ensures that certain types of transactions can comply with regulations. Development is open-source and the team budgets 20% of mining rewards for the BEAM growth pool, with the intention of encouraging adoption and developers to build on the platform. 

Privacy coins are a very prominent niche in the cryptocurrency market, with coins like Monero and Zcash being among the 25 tokens with the highest market cap. The privacy-facilitating technology of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) has spurred multiple teams to create tokens that shield recipient and sender data, as well as the transaction amount. Contrary to popular belief, Bitcoin is not truly anonymous, and startups are seeking to address this issue by building networks that have privacy integrated into it.

After the launch in March 2018, the team began working towards releasing a Proof-of-Concept and a testnet, which they did in June and September of 2018 respectively. The mainnet launch soon followed in December 2018, bringing with it a blockchain explorer, GPU mining support, atomic swaps, a mobile wallet, a payment integration API, among many other features. 

Having already completed payment and exchange, and mining pool APIs, the rest of 2019 sees the team focusing on Android and iOS wallets, multisignature support, a Lightning Network Proof-of-Concept, hardware wallet integration, TOR integration and a change to the Proof-of-Work algorithm.

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