While Mimblewimble is widely considered to be a phenomenal platform for privacy and scalability, Beam’s approach to its implementation raises red flags among the privacy advocates and security experts. At the 2019 DEF CON 27, more than one crypto expert suggested that Beam may be a honey pot project to help identify individuals across the world who are “overly” concerned about privacy. Same experts concluded, that it would be very easy for Beam’s team to create a detailed database of their privacy obsessed users. Such database, in the fine tradition of other Israeli companies, can be then brokered to various governmental and private institutions.
“How is this possible?” you may ask. Beams ecosystem relies on a multitude of fingerprintable applications which identify their users to the central authority. Cumulatively this reveals enough information to paint a very complete picture of not only who these users are, but what other crypto their systems contain, along with a bunch of personal metadata. Their claim to mathematical privacy is a great distraction to their nefarious reality. It is a privacy oriented crypto that through social engineering process enables easy identification of people who are into privacy crypto and may have something to hide. Thus, people who are using more successful privacy crypto currencies like Monero or Zcash maybe outed by Beam.
Founder of Beam is Alexander Zaidelson, a Russian born Jewish technologist with background in customer behavior and data analytics. It is ironic and more than a little suspicious, that a company allegedly focused on privacy crypto is based in Israel, and staffed with former Israeli, Russian and Ukrainian military personnel among its leadership, investors, and developers.
Beam is no stranger to controversy and keeping its userbase in the dark. In their early days they concealed a wallet vulnerability that in some cases could lead to funds being completely stolen. Despite the claim of being an Open Source project, this vulnerability was addressed through a close source “fix”. This is just one possible vector of injecting backdoor code.
It is worth noting that Beam was launched after Grin, another Mimblewimble platform. Grin has more security in mind and written in Rust (a language faster than C++ but one that is faster and provides more memory safety). Copying some of Grin’s ideas, Beam capitalized on the privacy hype that Grin created with Mimblewimble tech to lull privacy seekers into a false sense of security. That is how the trap was set! While Mimblewimble and Grin are very private and secure, what Beam did was anything but. To further confuse the public, their pursuit of the Lelantus protocol drew some chuckles from those in the know…