The above references an opinion and is for information purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.
Based in Zürich, Simon is an independent freelancer with a keen interest in digital assets and alternative investment. His background includes buy-side research position in investment companies and experience in Big Four accounting firms. Simon currently works as a junior portfolio manager in a wealth management company.
Graduated from the IFZ in Zug (Switzerland) with a MSc. in Banking & Finance, Simon started allocating digital assets as well as Bitcoin option strategies in his portfolio. Along with his personal researches, he developed a sound expertise in Distributed Ledger Technologies from an investment perspective and keeps on exploring the depths of this evolving technology.
Summary
Market Capitalization: USD 43’9 Mio.
Coin Market Cap Ranking: #88 (13th September 2019)
Validation: Proof of Work
This article is an update on Beam (BEAM), which was introduced in a research report earlier in June 2019. The aim is to summarize the absolute and relative performance against USD, respectively to Bitcoin (BTC) as well as the fundamentals including the latest developments and the company news’ flow.
Finally, a performance analysis will be conducted.
Fundamentals
Beam’s team was able to successfully carry out the first hard fork. The mining algorithm switched from Hash 1 to Hash 2 at Block height 321’321. With the hard fork, the team also implemented new features: Support for Confidential Assets (CA) transaction and HTLS, which enables payment channels. For preventing spam in the SBBS message network, PoW is now required and the minimum fee was set to 100 Groth.
Check here block height: https://explorer.beam.mw/
The main rationale behind forking was decided right at BEAM’S first steps. Approximately every 6 months a hard fork is performed to disincentivize ASICs developer. This time period is about the time ASICs are in development.
Furthermore, the applications on Android, iOS as well as Linux were enhanced, which theoretically, should increase the usability of Beam. Beam team will be present at the San Francisco Blockchain Week from 1st of October until 3rd of November, thus underlining the positive development.
Beam’s “fundamental” value is increasing. However, did this manifest into an increase of BEAMs price?
Beam Performance
The below graph shows BEAM performance since May 2019
Absolute and relative performance indices (Coinmarketcap.com)
The chart above illustrates the price movements of BEAM and BTC.
1st of May was chosen arbitrarily by the author.
By observing the chart, one can intuitively conclude, that BEAM correlates strongly with the BTC price movements. This is so far nothing new for experienced crypto investors, given the fact, that almost all altcoins move with BTC. They move less up when BTC rises and plunge harder as soon as BTC corrects to the downside. It is currently observed though that altcoins are heavily underperforming BTC.
On the contrary, Beam is outperforming BTC; interestingly during the time period from the 14th of August till the end of August. While BTC was stagnating, BEAM gained market capitalization.
Might it be idiosyncratic, because of the positive news flow and fundamental development from Beam?
For Beam Hash II Specification, have a look at the below paper