Today, we are working hard on one-sided payments, Laser Beam (payments through payment state channels), Integration with Trezor hardware wallet and other features.

Beam Network — Some Numbers

Since launch, Beam blockchain processed almost one million transactions, crunching out an average of 4.7 thousand transactions per day. This is far from saturation — the theoretical capacity is ~1000 transactions per block, so the network can support up to 1.44 million transactions per day.

The total hashrate since launch, reaching its peak of 6,804,956 Sol/s on Feb 3, and getting very close to all-time high again on July 7 with 6,785,822 Sol/s.

The size of UTXO set is reached around 760 thousand.

Network stats chart since launch

Some other fun facts:

The highest number of transactions (296) occurred in block 62510 on Feb 16, 2019

The highest number of inputs (4,523) was observed in block 28510 on Jan 23, 2019

The highest number of outputs (1,096) was observed in block 40104 on Jan 31, 2019

The highest total fee (300,000,160 Groth = 3 Beam) was paid in block 49535 on Feb 7, 2019

The total fees paid to miners so far are slightly over 180 Beam

Community

South Park

Building a viable and supportive community is extremely important. And our marketing strategy was quite straightforward: federate a community and gain its trust by creating an original series of products and not by trying to build empty hype.

Our first and foremost action was to build our narrative, our storytelling based on several archetypes coming from a sizeable cultural scale, including Ancient Greece (Prometheus Myth) and pop culture (Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvel and DC). We had then to define the game fields where we aimed to play with our community and to establish with it the game rules. And last but not least, once all this was achieved, we managed to create a culture that accompanies us until today and links us to our community. For example, our culture values privacy first and foremost, and this is the main reason why Beam is not using any of the Facebook products to engage with our community.

Apropos the community, we built it organically, without any incentives to encourage it. The vast majority of our community is supporting us not because of any promised reward or FOMO. People are with us because they share our values, like our technology and have faith in Beam.

To make it happen, we chose to trust some incredible people from all over the planet, coming from the Mining, Developers, Crypto and Privacy Advocacy areas, to spread the “good word” about Privacy, Mimblewimble, and eventually Beam. These professionals are volunteer Beam Ambassadors, and you can find them in Africa, Europe, Asia, and North America. Without their help and their actions, our community wouldn’t have been what it is now. Kudos to all of them!

And to get back to Beam Community, it is the most active in Telegram and Discord but also on Twitter and Medium. Today we engage ruffly with more than 40,000 members every month. And this figure is increasing day after on both a qualitative and quantitative perspective.

Next steps for Beam Community for Q3-Q4 2019 are to enter new geos and in particular South America and Africa, but also to emphasize the awareness about what Beam offers in terms of Financial Privacy and crypto usability by reaching new territories outside the cryptoworld.

Adoption

We are working hard to make Beam widely available for payments, giving payment privacy back to both merchants and consumers. Once we built the necessary infrastructure and performed integration with Coinpayments, we started to reach out to merchants and stores.

As of today, we have more than 30 stores and 40 VPN, hosting and other service providers then accept Beam.

We are constantly adding more merchants. The updated list of places where you can spend Beam is available here.

Exchanges

Since launch, Beam has been listed on over 25 exchanges and is actively traded by the community.

Mining

Miners are the lifeblood of any Proof-of-Work network.

Currently, there are 10 public mining pools which offer Beam mining and also a healthy network of decentralized solo miners across the globe. Beam can also be mined using a few mining rental services which are found online and the overall network average hashrate accumulatively, generates currently close to 5-Mega-Solutions per second (which is the equivalent of approximately 430,000 basic GPU hashrate), securing the network. We have continued to strive to make mining Beam relevant and easy to do and our respect to miners is equal, regardless of size or power of your mining equipment. Our dedicated support chat channels are a hive of activity with miners both experienced and newly learning and we are also redesigning the mining section of our website to include informative and interactive tools to assist miners more.

As we are nearing the switch over from our launch algorithm which was dubbed ‘BeamHashI’ (Equihash150,5), we will soon reach our first evolution in the Beam algorithm change.

As mentioned above; at block 321321, and to ensure continued support of the network by GPU miners, we are excited for our community to experience the new algorithm which promises to offer some small efficiency improvements. It is also encouraging to see that the current best-optimized miner softwares which are available to mine Beam will continue to evolve and update to assist Beam miners.

We continue to work with lolMiner developer and Beam advisor, Wilke Trei on this front and the new algorithm design is again, his own sole creation.

Beam has been integrated into a selection of minerOS (operating systems) and we continue to assist with this integration where requested, this includes both profit-switching operating systems and dedicated direct mining operating systems, some of which also now accept Beam as payment for their services.

Our team would furthermore like to acknowledge that Beam miners are integral to the functioning and decentralization of this entire ecosystem and securing the network to preserve privacy and sovereignty for all, is something for which we cannot express our gratitude enough.

Thank you Beam miners. May you profit long and preserve the core integrity for which we strive; sovereignty by design.

Plans for the next 6 months

Future Flash and Old Flash — DC Comics

In the coming six months we will continue to deliver on our published roadmap to make Beam more secure and easier to use. We will also work to establish partnerships with leading players in the crypto space.

We will be working on more usable atomic swaps, researching Confidential Assets and alternative Layer 1 solutions, and working to further improve blockchain privacy.

See our latest roadmap update for more details, and, as usual, stay tuned.