This week’s choices are dominated by a pair of highly anticipated projects that have just launched and make use of the groundbreaking MimbleWimble privacy protocol. They look set to bring attention back to privacy respecting projects and their ongoing project and community development should result in an increased amount of focus and possible user adoption.

Beam (BEAM)

Beam is a scalable, fungible, and confidential cryptocurrency based on the MimbleWimble implementation. The privacy coin allows more control over anonymity and all transactions are private by default, and no addresses or other private information are stored on the blockchain. However, Beam supports opt-in auditability, as well as support for online and offline transactions, atomic swaps, and hardware wallets.

Why Beam?

After launching on January 3, Beam is the first MimbleWimble project to hit the market. The project launched without an ICO or premine, and to receive Beam coins, users can mine transactions on the network, which can be done by everyday computer users. Beam is also already on exchanges, with more listings expected to come in February. The Beam community is growing, with close to 4,000 members in the Discord channel and over 7,000 on Telegram. Beam is a project that looks set to grow and grow in the future.

Grin (GRIN)

Grin makes use of MimbleWimble technology to enable private transactions and fungibility. The participants and amounts involved in Grin transactions are not visible to the public, and transactions can be trivially aggregated. Newly created transactions get relayed privately (a "random walk") among peers before being publicly announced.

Why Grin?

Grin was launched on January 15 and the launch was free of an ICO, pre-mine or founder’s reward. The project is developed openly, by an international body of developers, and isn’t controlled by any company, foundation or individual. This open source project is currently developing its community with interested parties being encouraged to engage in any way. Grin can also be mined by both CPU and GPU devices and is designed to be a lightweight and fair privacy coin of the people. Similar to Beam, this project looks set to grow over time and is definitely one to keep track of.

Nebulas (NAS)

Nebulas is a decentralized platform designed to facilitate the searching all blockchains. The NAS token provides incentives for PoD bookkeepers, and the team aim to also provide cross-chain search capabilities, and build an ecosystem that accurately reports the blockchain economy, and contains data analysis for market forecasting, and on-chain data monitoring and analysis for on-chain interactive marketing.

Why Nebulas?

The team have announced their Developer Incentive Program Launch with the official launch date being stated as January 21. The program follows on from the launch of Nebulas Nova and sees developers being rewarded in NAS testnet tokens for deploying smart contracts on Nebulas NOVA testnet. The program runs for 10 weeks from 21 January to 31 March and approximately 2500 NAS tokens are available. The full details can be found on the official blog post.

Buy Nebulas (NAS)

How to Buy Nebulas (NAS) on Binance?

How did the coins perform last week?

The late slump had a negative effect on the majority of coins, however, BNB rode the positive sentiment regarding the Binance Jersey launch and grew by 7.5%. WTC held its value and moved marginally at -0.20% and is currently trading at $1.12. OCN was the least resilient coin and fell by 4.5% and is currently trading at $0.002. Over the course of the week, after starting off positively, the total cap fell drastically resulting in a sideways move from around $118B on Monday to $119B on Sunday.