Trade.io, a Zug, Switzerland-based developer of a blockchain platform for improving the world’s financial ecosystem, recently conducted an interview with Alexander Zaidelson, the CEO of the Beam project, a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency.

Zaidelson, an MBA graduate from the Tel Aviv University, revealed that he began taking interest in the blockchain space when cryptocurrency prices surged to their all-time highs during the historic bull market of 2017. He remarked:

What really fascinated me was the idea that this technology can potentially replace a large part of the world’s money, or at least gold and store of value.

Cryptocurrency Prices To Surge By “Thousands Of Percents”

Zaidelson, who helped launch the development of the Beam protocol in 2018, noted that he “began to understand that the potential” for cryptographically secure assets is “really huge, so that’s what [initially] got [him] interested.” Zaidelson now believes that the prices of cryptocurrencies will “grow [by] hundreds, if not thousands, of percents.”

When questioned about Beam’s unique value proposition as a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, Zaidelson said:

BEAM [aims to be] a scalable and confidential cryptocurrency. So today, we know there are around 2,000 different crypto coins [and tokens], but the absolute majority of them are fully non-confidential, fully transparent.

He added: “So whenever someone” conducts transactions using Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH) Litecoin (LTC), or “any of the other well-known coins [and tokens], they need to realize that their transactions are observable and will remain on the blockchain forever.”

Zaidelson thinks that privacy is “super important” and “people realize that.” He acknowledged that several privacy coins were launched before the Beam protocol was released. These include Monero (XMR), whose team recently published a SWOT Analysis, and Zcash (ZEC), the developer of the widely-adopted zk-SNARKs-based privacy technology.

According to Zaidelson, most privacy coins do not have scalable networks and that the size of their respective blockchains is ”much [larger] than Bitcoin’s because they use the same basic architecture of Bitcoin.” Since they have also implemented privacy features, “they have to add [more features and functionality] onto the blockchain [in order] to hide the transaction history,” Zaidelson explained.

MimbleWimble Protocol Allows For Scalable And Enhanced Privacy Networks

He further noted: “MimbleWimble, as a protocol, actually solves the problem. Whoever invented it is an anonymous person, we don’t know who that is. They’ve created a system where it has all the benefits of the blockchain, it’s fully permission-less, decentralized,” and based on a proof-of-work (PoW) algorithm.

Moreover, the MimbleWimble protocol “gives [users] full confidentiality, so nobody can see what [they’re] doing, who [they’re] sending to and what [they’re] sending, and it does that without the penalty of scalability. So the blockchain is actually much smaller, than that of Bitcoin.”