Transcript: AMA Session Featuring Team Beam, led by Amir Aarnson With The Binance South-Africa Telegram Community

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Beam Africa

13 min readJun 6, 2020

The much-anticipated AMA with the Binance South-African community finally held yesterday. The Beam team led by Amir Aarnson, COO, Beam Foundation, interacted with the community for over an hour, on an array of subjects about Privacy, Beam and how important Africa is in the mass adoption of cryptocurrency. Other members of the Beam team are Angus Sullivan, Beam’s Head of Community and Agbona Igwemoh, Beam, Africa’s Lead.

The AMA session was moderated by 2 Binance angels, Lynley and Brenton. It was highly engaging and super interactive.

The AMA was made up of 3 segments:

1) Guest and project introduction + Questions from Angels

2) Special news from BEAM, for Africa, and additional info

3) Questions from YOU for the BEAM team, with the best questions winning BEAM!

Segment 1:

Brenton (Host): Hello Everyone! Welcome to a very exciting AMA, held exclusively for you, the Binance SA community. Today we have with us the COO of privacy coin, BEAM. BEAM is listed on Binance and has a market cap of over R430 million! @RaFun will be sharing a bit more on the project, answering your questions and giving away $50 in BEAM to some lucky Binancians.

Without further adieu, please help us to welcome the COO of BEAM, @RaFun. Before we get down to the questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to the community? Kindly also give an insight into the project and what it aims to achieve

Amir : Hey guys, a pleasure to be here!

My name is Amir, COO at Beam Foundation. I started to get involved in crypto around late 2016. I had several entrepreneurship projects in the US & Israel.

I started researching and learning about crypto at the end of 2016, before that I had a number of companies in Israel & the US.

I have travelled the world as a backpacker for over a year, but unfortunately, I have not yet arrived in South Africa 😕 I really like travelling, exploring and especially being on the move.

But enough about me lets talk about Beam! So what is Beam?

Beam is a privacy coin, meaning no one can see the sender, the receiver nor the amount. Moreover, unlike most cryptocurrencies, it is scalable — meaning the size of the blockchain doesn't grow linearly with the usage.

This is how Beam started but now it's much more than that actually, now its really becoming a confidential financial ecosystem that allows you to create & trade any digital assets and build a DeFi application on top.

I guess I will be talking about it soon.

Ohhh forgot to mention! Beam Africa will be giving away 50 USD in Beam to the best 5 participants

Brenton (Host): Wow! That is really exciting! $50 is almost R1000! we are very privileged to you have you with us today

Before we get to the community questions, The Angels are going to take the first crack at picking Amir’s brain

First off...

What is the difference between BEAM, and other privacy coins like ZCash and Monero?

Amir: We are honoured to be here, and indeed thanks to you and Beam Africa for arranging this session

That's a good question!

So I think they all have the same goal at the base but the technology and the usage are very different.

While we have a lot of respect for our friends at Zcash and Monero, Beam is superior in privacy, scalability and usability.

I'll try to break it down in a short way here.

Let's start with privacy, Monero enables confidentiality by using Ring Confidential Transactions and Stealth Addresses. It uses several “decoys” to each transaction, each looking equally likely to be the actual one spent in the transaction, thus making the actual source and destination next to impossible to trace.

That said, there are certain claims stating that there are ways to trace transactions on the Monero network.

For me the major issue here is that the blockchain is bloat with tons of unnecessary information (while getting a relatively small anonymity set), this can be a major issue if you look at long term adoption.

Now Zcash….

Zcash uses zk-SNARKs, a very advanced form of zero-knowledge cryptography. With zk-SNARKs, all transaction amounts, inputs, and outputs on the blockchain are entirely hidden.

HOWEVER, transactions on Zcash are not private by default! Users need to make those Z transactions to make it private. And, since zk-SNARKs are computationally heavy to create (it takes 1–3 minutes on a regular PC to create a private transaction on Zcash).

most users do not enable them, hurting overall privacy of the network.

Last time I checked less than 4% of the transactions are entirely private.

In addition, zk-SNARKs require a special secret key to set up the entire system. If this key leaks, the perpetrator can print money (trusted setup)

Zcash carries out multi-person ceremonies to create this key, and I have no reason to doubt the integrity of the people involved. However, this is still a valid concern.

So zcash can have a great privacy, but almost no one uses it. Thus making it a public blockchain that doesn’t scale well.

Now about Beam

Beam is built on Mimblewimble, a very elegant protocol that comes with both privacy & scalability. Transaction amount, sender and receiver are hidden using Confidential Transactions, and there are no “addresses” in the system — each user just holds private keys to the UTXOs he owns.

Privacy in Beam is enabled by default!

Actually, there are no “open” transactions at all.

Reading the blockchain would not give any information to the observer. In addition to Mimblewimble’s default privacy, we also implemented Dandelion, a networking policy which significantly improves anonymity. Dandelion prevents someone from observing the network traffic to infer any valuable information.

Now in terms of scalability, Beam uses cut-through mechanism to keep the blockchain small. The cut-through removes all the intermediate states of UTXOs, essentially leaving only unspent outputs on the blockchain.

Thus, the blockchain size does not grow with the number of transactions, but with the number of UTXOs, which is overall much slower.

Moreover, as stated above, this is how Beam stated now we are building on top of this great base great stuff!

It was a long walls of text so allow me to do a quick TL;DR here…

Beam is more private, scales much better, only a year and six months since mainnet and has more than 5K transactions a day which is all private by default. Using Beam is as easy as possible (try the wallet yourself and you’ll see what I mean).

Lynley (co-Host): Interesting….

What was your motivation for starting this project?

Amir: Well… I actually didn’t start it, but was the first non-tech guy to join 🙂

As for the motivation part…

I faced many many times the issues of using fiat worldwide, during all my endeavours.. I was amazed at how hard it is to pay suppliers & vendors overseas with the fiat system, then I started to look at crypto solutions.

At first it looked great, but then I realised that everyone can analyse my holdings and all my financial activity, now it’s not that I dealt with something confidential, but having your vendor know your holding is not a good thing.

So I was eager to find a privacy coin that met my needs which was and still are: easy to use wallets, fast transaction and private by default — back in 2017 there was no such thing.

Some of my connections led me to this new forming project named Beam — immediately realised it’s going to be a killer one, and that will solve exactly the issues I had too many other people.

Was definitely a wise choice for me to join Beam 🙂

Lynley (co-Host): Do you think Africa has any significant role to play in the future of Crypto, and perhaps even BEAM?

Amir: Sure!

Africa is a major continent, when I first talked to Agbona, Beam Africa Lead, I was amazed at the data he fed me. Africa is the global leader in mobile money, its fintech industry is expected to add $40 Billion to its GDP by 2022, also African fintech startups received amazing global VC funding in the past years.

Also, seeing some projects that are relatively well adopted here, of course, BTC & ETH but also younger projects like Steem, Eos, BNB & Dash prove that Africa can and will take a big part in the future of crypto.

I'm sure Beam can and will be widely adopted here as it already have good traction on some parts of Africa, and the need for a good, secure, private and easy to use coin will not go away.

Moreover, Beam will soon allow many features that we already see a need for in Africa, such as Laser Beam — our lightning version that allows performing super-fast micropayment, or the creation of stable privacy coin on top of Beam — think about the combination of both in a continent that now takes the next step to become cashless…

Brenton (Host): Are there any exciting updates or developments planned for BEAM in the near future?

Amir: Was hoping you’d ask that 🙂

That going to be a longer one 🙂

Brenton (Host): Sounds like an exciting answer!!

Amir: So first of all we will have the long-awaited, consensus upgrade (AKA Hard Fork) at the end of the month, this will first improve and bring great and VERY exciting features to Beam.

Amir: Here are the ones I most excited about:

Activate support for Confidential Assets — Anyone will be able to issue their own token on top of Beam, for a variety of different use cases. They can create Confidential Synthetics (commodities like gold, stable coins, and digital assets such as shares, stocks, and bonds, etc.), Confidential Wrapped Assets (BTC, ETH, etc.), and Community Coins/Tokens, private STOs/ICOs and more all this while enjoying Beam features, great wallets, Atomic swap and API to provide liquidity to the marketplace.

Activate support for- Lelantus Mimblewimble — Lelantus adds to Beam’s already stellar privacy, enabling users to break the linkability of their UTXOs, and giving them extra protections when absolutely necessary.

Activate support for One-Sided Payments — transactions of Beam are currently interactive, given the nature of the Mimblewimble protocol. For some situations, this can pose an inconvenience, especially for those that are used to the way Bitcoin and most cryptocurrency transactions work today. One-sided payments, via Lelantus Mimblewimble, will allow users to make a transaction without the need to interactively construct it with the receiver.

Web Wallet & Wallet Service API is going to be the focal point of the DeFi ecosystem, bringing Beam to every browser (and to 3rd party wallets integrations) with great user experience and without sacrificing users’ privacy

All those great futures are really around the corner, in the coming months we are also planning to release Bridges to ETH will allow creating Beam representation of certain ERC20 tokens and creating 1-to-1 pegs of such ERC20 tokens to their representation on Beam blockchain.

For example, users will be able to lock a certain amount of Dai in the Bridge’s smart contract, and get the exact same amount of bDai on the Beam Blockchain. The bDai tokens can be freely transacted between Beam wallets, and can also be transferred back to Dai at any moment.

Wallet Auditability — an opt-in feature in the wallet that will allow institutional and business users to seamlessly report their transactions to third parties of their choice.

It is really a great time to follow Beam — SO MUCH is going on

Lynley (co-Host): That sounds really amazing, will certainly follow Beam a bit more closely now

Amir: BTW our desktop wallets already support the coming fork..we encourage all users to update before the hard fork (mobile version will be updated soon)

Lynley (co-Host): We see BEAM didn’t do an ICO, how did you develop the project and are there any notable investors on board?

Amir: indeed, no ICO and no pre-mine.

Beam is working according to the treasury model, we did raise funds only from accredited investors, mostly VCs. They are getting their coins on monthly vesting, for the next 5 years, so there is good alignment of interest here for the long run.

Now the Beam foundation is also getting coins from the treasury and governing the protocol, allowing a fast and professional development to take place.

The fact that the investors are getting the coins spread over 5 years, by itself screened the kind of investors we didn’t want to have.

For me, the most notable investor was Recruit, which is a public traditional Japanese company that stands behind many well-known unicorns, also the fact that they invested in a private coin while it’s still not allowed to be traded in Japan says a lot about the value they can bring, and maybe about their strategy

Brenton (Host): Wow! That sounds really exciting. Remember Binancians, BEAM is listed on Binance.

Segment 2: Special news from BEAM

Before we get to the questions and prizes, the BEAM team have some really exciting news to share regarding Africa! Take it away guys. . .

Agbona: Hello guys, hope you’re all having a great time like I am.

Before the launch of the project’s mainnet, Beam has had an active presence in Africa.

It started with 2 ambassadors in Nigeria, today, Beam Africa has a team of 6 exceptional individuals promoting Beam on the Africa continent.

We have 4 ambassadors in Nigeria, one in Dublin, South Africa, and another in Nairobi, Kenya.

We are currently looking for ambassadors to bolster our ranks with crypto enthusiasts that are talented and driven in the following regions; Ghana, South
Africa, Rwanda and Uganda.

Breton (Host): Wow!!! We will post the link again for people to apply as soon as the AMA is over.

Segment 3: Audience Questions:

Oyibo Pepper: Doesn’t the “opt-in compliance” negates the whole idea of privacy, now how can we trust the regulators/auditors to keep the information data private? Who are these regulators and auditors?

Why did Beam have to do HARDFORK and what’s the advantage

Explain more about LASER BEAM — Layer 2 solution for fast payment channels on top of Beam. Would BEAM focus on payments or also engage other valuable industries?

Amir: Good one!

All TX are private by defaults, you ad a user will be able to generate a key that YOU can share with your CPA, Auditor, Bank….. they will only see you tx… kinda a read me only wallet… now this is an opt-in feature definitely not a must… and this allows wider adoption to compliance businesses.. while keeping all the other fully private

CC+ Amb: Ambassadors play a very important role in every project, Do you have an ambassador program? If yes, how can I be one?

Amir: Sure! We have an ambassador page on the website, and Beam Africa is constantly looking for good people that share the same values1

CC+ Amb: Any Scheduled date for Beam Hard fork ?

Amir: Yes! It will be in block 777,777 — the estimated date is 28th June

CC+ Amb: You had no ICO, how then did you generate funds to keep the project running upon till this time ?

Amir: I think I answered it above, we work according to the treasury model, and the foundation get coins form each block that is mined for the first 5 years

iZulu: DeFi has been one of the top topics in crypto how can beam be used especially in the context of Africa to promote decentralized finance.

Agbona: This is an interesting question.

With the upcoming Hardfork, which is estimated to happen on the 28th of June, this will activate the Confidential asset CA, With the CA, this will enable the development of other projects on the Beam existing framework. These assets will still have Beam’s functionalities like scalability and privacy.

We believe the Confidential Asset will take a step further towards a DeFi reality.

Dyor Boy: Can you tell a bit more about $Beam. team? And what’s your roadmap for 2020? Do you plan to have thrive growing in EUROPEAN market?

Amir: Our team have about 20 + members. Most are professional experienced developers. They are spread over the globe…. From Belarus, Ukraine ,UK, Israel, Thailand, Malaysia and more …. all are working from home….this is also why the pandemic didn't affect Beam dev and we had several releases during this time…

As for the road map … see the last update here

A newer one will be shared soon

Beast: what is Tor/I2P?

Angus: A great question 😄

TOR = The onion router

I2P = Invisible Internet Project

As you know, Beam has great privacy on the blockchain. There are no addresses, so you cannot see the sender or receiver, and it also hides the amount being sent.

What TOR and I2P add to, is the network-level privacy.

These work to add an anonymous network layer that allows for censorship-resistant, peer to peer communications.

Beam already has Dandelion++ for network-level privacy, which helps to obfuscate the sender of a transactions IP address by routing it to random nodes (stem phase) before propagating it to the wider network (fluff phase), making it look like a Dandelion 😄

Tor / I2p would take this a step further, and offer better privacy protections on the network layer 😎

Mastermp3: Beam is a critical wallet in wallet. How did you discover and fix it, and what will be the positive impact crypto market? What is Competition Between Beam and Grin? Grin for a Beam funded security audit. Why?

Amir: Beam did have a critical issue around 2 weeks after mainnet launch.. and we published a detailed article about it… we found the bug ourself and no funds were lost to any user… We issued a fixed version immediately after, I think we handled it in a very professional way…

Beam did donate to Grin security effort (Twice!) the reason is we truly believe Mimblewimble should and will gain traction as this protocol is superior… and our end goal is to promote financial privacy…

The team have ongoing open discussions… I wish to see more such friendly competitors in the space

Oyibo: Considering the troubles facing privacy coins, how will BEAM cope in the nearest future with legal framework and competition

Recently some flaws were exposed on mimblewimble, please how does BEAM deal with this, maintaining user privacy

Amir: Reregulation — we chose the ideal path in my opinion, which is opt-in auditor wallet…

we do not force the whole network to give away privacy, we give the user who needs/wants to comply with regulation the option to do so… thus keeping his privacy to the world while keeping fully compliant (kinda similar to what cash can offer)…

As for the flaws was exposed on Mimblewimble, The “Breaking Mimblewimble Privacy Model” attack will not be effective on Beam — Beam’s decoy outputs make it much harder to build the transaction graph. Upcoming Lelantus-MW will make building the transaction graph virtually impossible even against more sophisticated attacks. You can see more about it here

Brenton (Host): Any final words Amir?

Amir: It was truly an honour to talk to you today, thank you for having me here, I really hope you learned more about Beam and the importance of privacy in general. Hope to see you on the Beam community soon! Have a great weekend!

Transcript: AMA Session Featuring Team Beam, led by Amir Aarnson With The Binance South-Africa Telegram Community

Written by Beam Africa