BEAM is a confidential decentralized finance (DeFi) platform that runs on a combination of two blockchain protocols (LelantusMW and Mimblewimble). In the early years of the industry transactions with public-blockchain cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) were thought to be untraceable. With developments in blockchain analysis it became clear that transactions can actually be traced back to the senders posing a great threat to users' privacy. To solve this issue BEAM came up with innovative ways of increasing the anonymity of transactions address balances and user identities.Beam runs on the Mimblewimble protocol and was launched in March 2018.