Good News For MimbleWimble: BEAM succeeds in its hard fork!

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MimbleWimble focuses on the confidentiality of transactions. GRIN and BEAM (launched in January 2019) are the two main cryptocurrency projects that exploit this protocol. BEAM has developed its network thanks to a hard fork: an overview of changes.

A brand new new algorithm!

After a first hard fork in August 2019, the BEAM project has just successfully completed its second global update this June 28.

The hard fork occurred at block N ° 777 777 last Sunday. It was unanimous in the BEAM community, so there was no division into two blockchains.

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The main change brought by this hard fork is the change from BeamHash II to BeamHash III, a new algorithm for BEAM Proof of Work (PoW) consensus.

Stabilized and ASIC resistant network

The overall difficulty of the network (see below) has changed accordingly. The laggards miners - who had not yet updated their mining software - not more involved with blocks validations. In addition, BeamHash III has been designed to naturally reduce the speed of calculation by graphics card.

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The total computing power of the network (hashrate) returned to its rate before the hard fork, barely 24 hours after the occurrence of the latter.

The objective of these first two hard forks is to discourage the development of specialized mining machines (such as ASICs). These devices tend to centralize power in the hands of big players.

You can see the list of other changes made on the BEAM team blog. GRIN, the other project which exploits the MimbleWimble protocol, will also experience a hard fork within a fortnight.