We’re excited to welcome – Alex Romanov, CTO (honorary title) and current tech lead at Beam.
Chris: Beam positions privacy as a default, not an option. In a world increasingly focused on compliance and transparency, how do you reconcile uncompromising privacy with regulatory pressure?
Alex: While being fully confidential by default, Beam supports opt-in auditability. This means that every user can choose to disclose specific details of their on-chain activity to any third party and be able to cryptographically prove that this is indeed what can be seen on chain, but without having to share it with everyone. Some of these features, like for example a transaction proof, are already implemented in Beam wallets, while others have only been discussed and designed at the infrastructure level — meaning the underlying protocol could support them, but they have not yet been implemented in practice.
Chris: Many privacy projects faded due to exchange delistings and scrutiny. What has Beam done differently to survive and evolve while staying true to its core ethos?
Alex: Beam was started in 2018 and launched on January 3rd, 2019, which means that we celebrated our 7th year this last January. Indeed, during this time we had delistings, pumps and dumps, but being a group of people who are genuinely interested in bringing privacy to crypto, we have remained present and engaged to this very day. As crypto has changed a lot during these years, so did Beam — always trying to address the current needs and technological challenges. We were one of the first to enable Confidential DeFi by adding a virtual machine to Beam and thus allowing the creation of privacy-preserving dApps, including a DEX, a CDP-based stablecoin called Nephrite, a NFT marketplace, and many more.
Chris: Beam combines Mimblewimble with Lelantus — two powerful privacy approaches. What specific limitations of Mimblewimble were you solving by integrating Lelantus?
Alex: Mimblewimble is an amazing protocol with a unique history. Invented in 2016 by an anonymous author whose identity is not known to this very day, Mimblewim ble combines conceptual simplicity with an amazing capacity for extension and improvement. Out of the box, Mimblewimble provided not just privacy but also a compact blockchain design, which was a major differentiating factor in comparison to Monero and Zcash, two main competitors in those early days.
Using the flexible mechanism of Mimblewimble transaction kernels, which are included in every transaction, Beam was able to add a variety of powerful functions such as atomic swaps (implemented with Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and a few other blockchains), smart contracts (via Beam virtual machine integration), and many more amazing features.
One weakness of the original Mimblewimble design, however, was the ability for an active attacker to establish a statistical correlation between sender and receiver wallets by sending multiple transactions to one of the wallets and monitoring the transaction graph. Despite using the Dandelion protocol to obfuscate transaction propagation, this attack was still possible to execute and thus hindered Beam’s privacy goals. Integration of the Lelantus protocol, which was originally developed for Firo, allowed Beam to implement a new transaction type that would completely break any possible link in the trans action graph. The result of this integration work became known as Lelan tusMW — a protocol that combines the best of both worlds and provides great privacy without sacrificing any of the advantages of the original Mim blewimble in flexibility and features. We have even published a paper about it.
Chris: A 64K anonymity set is impressive — what trade-offs (if any) exist between maximum anonymity and network performance?
Alex: 64K is the theoretical limit of the anonymity set size, but in reality it depends on the amount of network usage, as it takes time between the moment a transaction is sent and when the UTXO can be spent from the pool. Beam wallets are configured to automatically optimize the UTXO selection for the best possible anonymity set, but it might take a bit longer than the usual average block time of one minute to achieve optimal anonymity. So you might say that the main trade-off is the period of time before a received UTXO can be spent, compared to a regular transaction.
Chris: Confidential DeFi is still largely unexplored. What are the biggest technical barriers to building private AMMs, lending protocols, and oracles?
Alex: In Beam, DeFi applications preserve your identity; however, the actual values in the smart contracts are visible on chain. Other technologies, like Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) or Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), are better suited to protect the calculations themselves. In terms of speed and flexibility, there are no limitations on what can be implemented on Beam today compared to any other Turing-complete VMs such as Ethereum’s EVM or others.
Chris: Atomic swaps with assets like BTC, LTC, and DOGE are a big differentiator. Why did you prioritize atomic swaps over wrapped assets initially?
Alex: Atomic swaps are the pinnacle of decentralized value exchange, as they allow exchanging value on different blockchains in a peer-to-peer way without requiring any third party. The main problem is the time it takes for the swap to complete, since we need to make sure the assets were settled on the slower of the two chains (in the case of Bitcoin, ten minutes on average for one block) and that a sufficient number of confirmations was received before the settlement can be finalized to avoid the problem of reorgs. This makes atomic swaps take longer than most alternatives, and hence less practical in day-to-day trading. Having said that, they are much more secure than bridged wrapped assets, as bridges are a notorious weak spot and are often attacked by malicious actors.
Chris: Beam launched with no ICO or premine, which is rare. In hindsight, did that decision slow down growth compared to VC-backed competitors?
Alex: Beam did raise VC funding, but instead of an ICO we decided to implement a five-year treasury plan in which 20% of the mining rewards were allocated to a treasury that was distributed to early investors and stakeholders on a monthly basis. This allowed us to move very quickly while also having a long-term alignment of incentives for all involved parties. The treasury program ended after five years, and now 100% of the rewards go to the miners.
Chris: Beam uses BeamHash III optimized for GPUs. In 2026, does GPU mining still provide meaningful decentralization, or is it becoming obsolete?
Alex: Beam started with BeamHash I back in 2019, which was a modified version of the Equihash algorithm, and upgraded to BeamHash III in a second planned fork. BeamHash III was developed specifically for Beam with the goal of providing excellent GPU mining efficiency, while at the same time not giving ASICs an exponential advantage over GPUs. Because of these properties, Beam was very profitable to mine during most of the years of its existence, and the protocol is still extremely well positioned today.
Chris: Which upcoming feature are you personally most excited about — and why does it matter for mainstream adoption?
Alex: As blockchain technology has become more and more popular in trading both native crypto and real-world assets, it has become clear that finality time is a critical parameter that affects the way a blockchain is used. PoW chains have always had significantly higher finality times than PoS and other types of consensus, while being more decentralized and reliable. As Beam is a PoW chain with the goal of providing long-term stability, we decided to build a fast sidechain we have called Beam Warp to allow one-second blocks with immediate finality. Beam Warp uses a delegated proof-of-stake consensus and allows moving assets from the Beam chain to Beam Warp and back through a native integrated bridge solution that is protected by the entire validator set of the blockchain. Since Beam Warp is based on the same protocol stack, no privacy is lost in the transition between the chains. We believe this design will allow our traders to benefit from fast transactions without any compromise to the confidentiality Beam provides by default.
Chris: If Beam succeeds at the highest level, what changes in the world because of it?
Alex: Beam sees it as its highest goal to preserve and uphold the values of cryptocurrency, including decentralization, ownership (not your keys, not your coins), sovereignty, security, and privacy. Unfortunately, we have seen many of these values being neglected and their importance has deteriorated over the years. Beam’s mission is to provide uncompromising technology that is powerful enough for all existing financial applications, while at the same time preserving all of the advantages of the crypto movement and its philosophy.
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