Beam undergoes hard fork, paving way for confidential DeFi

Yesterday, Beam underwent a successful a successful hard fork, paving the way for confidential DeFi on Beam. The event occurred at block height 777,777. It contained Beam's second mining algorithm change (BeamHashIII) and last planned consensus change. The fork also included activation for the support of confidential assets, which enabled independent tokens to be issued on the Beam network that benefit from the the confidentiality and scalability features of Beam, and Lelantus-MW, which will further protect users privacy via a Breaking Linkability feature and enable one side payments.

Why it matters:

• Broadly speaking, DeFi is booming. The upgrade provides the foundation for Beam to create its own DeFi ecosystem, with the added benefit of native confidentiality.
• The hard fork marks Beam's attempts to move beyond the "privacy coin" moniker people have given it due its reliance on MimbleWimble.